"No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and famil- iarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming lan- guage."'--Thomas Jefferson. Was ever a letter like that written about an editor of the _New York Observer?_ Was it in consideration of the services of a drunken beast that the Legislature of Pennsylvania presented Thomas Paine with five hundred pounds sterling? 482 Did the State of New York feel indebted to a drunken beast, and confer upon Thomas Paine an estate of several hundred acres? "I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creat- ures happy." "My own mind is my own church." "It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself." "Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system." "The Word of God is the creation which we behold." "The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system." "It is with a pious fraud as with a bad action--it begets a calamitous necessity of going on." "To read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benev- olent in the heart of man." "The man does not exist who can say I have per- secuted him, or that I have in any case returned evil for evil." "Of all tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst." 483 "My own opinion is, that those whose lives have been spent in doing good and endeavoring to make their fellow-mortals happy, will be happy hereafter." "The belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man." "The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker, and in which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other." "No man ought to make a living by religion. One person cannot act religion for another--every person must perform it for himself." "One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests." "Let us propagate morality unfettered by super- stition." "God is the power, or first cause, Nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon." "I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life." "The key of heaven is not in the keeping of any sect nor ought the road to it to be obstructed by any." "My religion, and the whole of it, is the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy." "I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind. I 484 take care of both, by nourishing the first with tem- perance and the latter with abundance." "He lives immured within the Bastile of a word." How perfectly that sentence describes you! The Bastile in which you are immured is the word "Calvinism." "Man has no property in man." What a splendid motto that would have made for the _New York Observer_ in the olden time!