Possibly the turning of several church-members from their faith may not have been so much due to Paine as to the parsons, in showing their "religion" as a gorgon turning hearts to stone against a benefactor of mankind. One day Paine went with Colonel Kirkbride to visit Samuel Rogers, the Colonels brother-in-law, at Bellevue, across the river. As he entered the door Rogers turned his back, refusing his old friend's hand, because it had written the "Age of Reason." Presently Borden-town was placarded with pictures of the Devil flying away with Paine. The pulpits set up a chorus of vituperation. Why should the victim spare the altar on which he is sacrificed, and justice also? Dogma had chosen to grapple with the old man in its own way. That it was able to break a driven leaf Paine could admit as truly as Job; but he could as bravely say: Withdraw thy hand from me, and I will answer thee, or thou shalt answer me! In Paine too it will be proved that such outrages on truth and friendship, on the rights of thought, proceed from no God, but from the destructive forces once personified as the adversary of man. Early in March Paine visited New York, to see Monroe before his departure for France. He drove with Kirkbride to Trenton; but so furious was the pious mob, he was refused a seat in the Trenton stage. They dined at Government House, but when starting for Brunswick were hooted These were the people for whose liberties Paine had marched that same road on foot, musket in hand. At Trenton insults were heaped on the man who by camp-fires had written the _Crisis_, which animated the conquerors of the Hessians at that place, in "the times that tried men's souls." These people he helped to make free,--free to cry _Crucify!_ Paine had just written to Jefferson that the Louisianians were "perhaps too much under the influence of their priests to be sufficiently free." Probably the same thought occurred to him about people nearer home, when he presently heard of Colonel Kirkbride's sudden unpopularity, and death. On October 3d Paine lost this faithful friend.* * It should be stated that Burlington County, in which Bordentown is situated, was preponderantly Federalist, and that Trenton was in the hands of a Federalist mob of young well-to-do rowdies. The editor of the _True American_, a Republican paper to which Paine had contributed, having commented on a Fourth of July orgie of those rowdies in a house associated with the revolution, was set upon with bludgeons on July 12th, and suffered serious injuries. The Grand Jury refused to present the Federalist ruffians, though the evidence was clear, and the mob had free course.