"Thomas Paine did not recant. But the church is recanting. On her death-bed tenet after tenet of the absurd and cruel creed which Paine opposed is being renounced by her. Time will witness the renunciation of her last dogma and her death. Then will the vindication of Thomas Paine and the 'Age of Reason' be complete."--_The Fathers of Our Republic_. PAINE'S PLACE IN LITERATURE. Royal Tyler: "That head which worked such mickle woe to courts and kings." Dr. Edmund Robinet: "A wise and lucid intellect." James Thompson Callender: "He possesses both, talent and courage." Walter Savage Landor: "Few dared such homely truths to tell, Or wrote our English half so well." Zells Encyclopedia: "He early distinguished himself by his literary abilities." Cyclopedia of American Literature: "The merits of Paine's style as a prose writer are very great." B. F. Underwood: "Thomas Paine's style as a writer, in some respects, has never been equaled. Every sentence that he wrote was suffused with the light of his own luminous mind, and stamped with his own intense individuality of character." "There is a peculiar originality in his style of thought and expression, his diction is not vulgar or illiterate, but nervous, simple and scientific.... Paine, like the young Spartan warrior, went into the field stripped bare to the last thread of prudent conventional disguise; and thus not only fixed the gaze of men upon his intrepid singularity, but exhibited the vigor of his faculties in full play."--_Rev. George Croly_. John Lendrum: "The style, manner, and language of the author is singular and fascinating." "He was a magnificent writer of the English language."--_Henry Frank_. "He is the best English writer we know."--_Gilbert Vale_. "Ease, fluidity, grace, imagination, energy, earnestness, mark his style."--_Elbert Hubbard_. "Paine is the first American writer who has a literary style, and we have not had so many since but that you may count them on the fingers of one hand."--_Ibid._ L. Carroll Judson: "His intellectual powers suddenly burst into a blaze of light." John Horne Tooke: "You are like Jove coming down upon us in a shower of gold." "The man who coined the intellectual gold of the Eighteenth Century was Thomas Paine."--_L. K. Washburn_. Ebenezer Elliott: "Paine is the greatest master of metaphor I have ever read." "He was not only master of metaphor, he was master of principles. He imparted life to great ideas."--_George Jacob Holyoake._ "The keenness of his intellect was matched by the brilliancy of his imagination. He stated a truth in a way that men could see, hear, and feel it. Take the following epigram: 'To argue with a man who has renounced the use of Reason is like administering medicine to the dead.'"--_George W. Foote_. Prof. William Smyth: "Paine is a writer to be numbered with those few who are so supereminently fitted to address the great mass of mankind."