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 Thomas
Paine was a deist, a freethinker who accepted “God” on a
basis of reason and nature, but rejected revelation and all
positive religion. Some think the deist attitude was the result
of weariness with the endless theological and doctrinal
controversies of the day. Whatever the cause, we certainly do
not commend this concept of God. Further, we find such a concept
inconsistent with statements quoted below.
But
we are trying to give readers a better sense of historic
heritage and, like it or not, we are benefactors of many with
whom we differ. In Paine’s “The Rights of Man” he flails
man’s presumption to tell God whom He may tolerate, or reject.
His words are important because of their impact on our
forefathers, in the forming of principles of freedom for our
nation.
I
do not know where Paine got his ideas, but he could have
learned this truth from the revelation he rejected. Paul
teaches the same principle, in Rom. 14:4, 12. Our source is “Citizen
Tom Paine,” by Howard Fast, 1943.
“Toleration
is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of
it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of
withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it.
The one is the Pope armed with fire and faggot, and the other is
the Pope selling or granting indulgence. The former is Church
and State, and the latter is Church and traffic.
But
Toleration may be viewed in a much
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stronger light. Man worships
not himself, but his Maker; and the liberty of conscience
which he claims is not for the service of himself, but of us
God. In this case, therefore, we must necessarily have the
associated idea of two beings; the moral who renders the
worship, and the IMMORTAL BEING who is worshiped. Toleration,
therefore, places itself, not between man and man, nor between
Church and Church, nor between one denomination of religion and
another, but between God and man; between the being who
worships, and the BEING who is worshiped — and by the same act
of assumed authority by which it tolerates man to pay his
worship, it presumptuously and blasphemously sets itself up to
tolerate the Almighty to receive it.
Were
a Bill brought into any Parliament, entitled, ‘An Act to
tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship
of a Jew or a Turk,’ or ‘to prohibit the Almighty from
receiving it,’ all men would startled and call it blasphemy.
There would be an uproar. The presumption of toleration in
religious matters would then present itself unmasked; but the
presumption is not the less because the name of ‘Man’ only
appears to those laws, for the associated idea of the worshiped
and the worshiper cannot be separated.
Who
then art thou, vain dust and ashes! by whatever name thou art
called, whether a King, a Bishop, a Church, or a State, a
Parliament, or anything else, that obtrudest thine
insignificance between the soul of man and its Maker?”
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