* "But I would not forcibly suppress this book ["Age of Reason"]; much less would I punish (O my God, be such wickedness far from me, or leave me destitute of thy favour in the midst of this perjured and sanguinary generation!) much less would I punish, by fine or imprisonment, from any possible consideration, the publisher or author of these pages."--Letter of Gilbert Wakefield to Sir John Scott, Attorney General, 1798. For evidence of Unitarian intolerance see the discourse of W, J. Fox on "The Duties of Christians towards Deists" (Collected Works, vol. i.). In this discourse, October 24, 1819, on the prosecution of Carlile for publishing the "Age of Reason," Mr. Fox expresses his regret that the first prosecution should have been conducted by a Unitarian. "Goaded," he says, "by the calumny which would identify them with those who yet reject the Saviour, they have, in repelling so unjust an accusation, caught too much of the tone of their opponents, and given the most undesirable proof of their affinity to other Christians by that unfairness towards the disbeliever which does not become any Christian." Ultimately Mr. Fox became the champion of all the principles of "The Age of Reason" and "The Rights of Man." The prig perished; in his place stood a martyr of the freedom bound up with the work he had assailed. Paine's other assailant, the Bishop of Llandaff, having bent before Pitt, and episcopally censured the humane side he once espoused, Gilbert Wakefield answered him with a boldness that brought on him two years' imprisonment When he came out of prison (1801) he was received with enthusiasm by all of Paine's friends, who had forgotten the wrong so bravely atoned for. Had he not died in the same year, at the age of forty-five, Gilbert Wakefield might have become a standard-bearer of the freethinkers. Paine's recovery after such prolonged and perilous suffering was a sort of resurrection. In April (1796) he leaves Monroe's house for the country, and with the returning life of nature his strength is steadily recovered. What to the man whose years of anguish, imprisonment, disease, at last pass away, must have been the paths and hedgerows of Versailles, where he now meets the springtide, and the more healing sunshine of affection! Risen from his thorny bed of pain-- "The meanest floweret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies, To him are opening paradise."