Thomas Paine

The teaching

Taught from The Age of Reason (1794 to 1807) and his essay On the Origin of Freemasonry.

My own mind is my own church

Paine sets out his creed at the opening of The Age of Reason. He hopes for happiness beyond this life; he believes in the equality of man; and he holds that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy. He does not believe the creed of any church, Jewish, Roman, Greek, Turkish, Protestant or other: my own mind, he writes, is my own church. Every national church is for him a human invention, set up to terrify and enslave mankind and to monopolise power and profit, yet he condemns no one who believes otherwise, since they have the same right to their belief as he has to his.

Revelation at second hand

His case against revealed religion begins with a definition. Revelation, if there is any, is something communicated immediately from God to a person. To that first person it may be revelation; when he tells it to a second, and the second to a third, it is revelation no longer but hearsay, and no one is bound to believe it on another's word. When Moses told the people that he had received the commandments from the hand of God, they had only his word for it; and the commandments, Paine notes, carry no inward proof of divinity, for any lawgiver of good sense might have made them.

The word of God is the creation

Where, then, is the word of God? Not in any book, he answers, for human language is local and changeable, open to mistranslation, to the errors of copyists and to deliberate alteration, and a word meant for all mankind cannot hang on it. The word of God is the creation we behold, which speaks a universal language every nation can read. Would we see his power, we see it in the immensity of the creation; his wisdom, in the unchanging order by which the whole is governed; his bounty, in the abundance with which he fills the earth; his mercy, in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful.

This is the whole of his deism: to know God by his works, and to imitate his goodness in our dealings with his creatures.

Science, the true theology

Paine holds that the sciences are the true theology. The principles of geometry and astronomy were not invented by people but discovered: they are the laws by which God governs the universe, set out in its structure as by a lecturer who invites his hearers to study and to imitate. He would have the churches teach natural philosophy in place of mysteries.

He turns astronomy against the creeds. If the stars are suns with worlds of their own, perhaps inhabited, it is past belief, he argues, that the maker of them all should leave the care of all the rest to come down and die on one small world, because one man and one woman had eaten an apple.

The Bible as a human book

In the second part he reads the Bible as he would read any ancient book, asking who wrote each part and when. The books of Moses tell of his death and burial and speak of him in the third person, so they were written after him; Genesis lists the kings who reigned in Edom before any king reigned over Israel, so it was written after Israel had kings. Mystery, miracle and prophecy, he says, are the three means by which impostors in every age have imposed on mankind.

Of Jesus he speaks with respect: a virtuous and amiable man, whose morality was of the most benevolent kind, preached in like forms by Confucius and some of the Greek philosophers before him and by good men in every age since, and never exceeded.

The Sun in the lodge

In his essay on Freemasonry Paine reads the craft as the last remnant of the religion of the Druids, and theirs as the old worship of the Sun. The lodge is laid out east and west and its Master stands in the east, where the Sun rises; the craft keeps its two great feasts at the solstices, on the days of Saint John in June and December; and its emblems of the Sun and Moon and its secrecy are, for him, the signs of a faith that hid in the lodges when the Church persecuted it. Christianity, in the same essay, is a parody on the worship of the Sun, putting a man called Christ in the Sun's place and paying him the adoration once paid to the Sun.

This is his reading. The plain record is otherwise: the craft's own documents lead back to the lodges of working stonemasons in Britain, not to the Druids.