He was elected to a seat in the National Convention, the latest legislative embodiment of the French nation. But events swept Paine’s French associates onto the wrong side of history. The Jacobins rose to power and dispatched their opponents to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794). The Jacobins also arrested Paine as an enemy alien; France and England were now at war. Just before entering Luxembourg Prison, Paine gave his friend Joel Barlow, an American poet, the manuscript for The Age of Reason, yet one more outraged and outrageous attack on the status quo.

Paine spent ten months incarcerated before James Monroe, the new American minister to France and an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, rescued him. Seriously ill at the time of his release, Paine convalesced in Monroe’s home, where he completed the second part of The Age of Reason.

Perhaps more than any other of his writings, The Age of Reason resonates today because the issues of revelation, human divinity, and the contradictory claims of the world’s religions that Paine addressed are still being debated. He started off his tract on religion flying his colors: “My own mind is my own church” (p. 258). From that declaration, Paine plowed into the thicket of biblical exegesis. He blithely compared the gospels with Greek mythology because both involved divinities visiting the earth. Revelation, he argued, could happen only to the person to whom God was revealed. For all others, the account was mere hearsay. Perhaps the most radical aspect of his discourse on his faith was the jaunty way he wrote about beliefs that most of his contemporaries considered sacred. Declaring himself a Deist, Paine acknowledged the existence of God and of an afterlife. The evidence of a creator was the creation of the world itself, he believed. The argument for the existence of God from design had been talked about for a long time, but Paine, with his usual flair, reached a larger audience with his promotion of this religious position. What Paine took on faith was the orderliness of nature and the existence of a divine design. Introducing people to this creation-centered religion was, for Paine, another way of unshackling them from the outworn ideas that restricted their God-given potential to develop freely.

Paine maintained that moribund ideas acted like chains binding the imagination of his contemporaries. As his many writings attest, he knew the Bible thoroughly. Along with Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible represented the one literary resource that all the people knew. It was read aloud every Sunday. What he had come to detest was the literal interpretation of the Bible used by conservatives to repel reform and instill the fear of change in credulous people. Leaders, in Paine’s view, should be fighting superstition, not pandering to people’s fears. Education, not indoctrination, would erase their ignorance and timidity in tandem. Like most Enlightenment reformers, Paine was more anticlerical than antireligious. He abhorred established religions that operated as a monopoly of religious truths. Equally, he rejected the claims of all religions, relishing the observation that their pretensions—whether about Jesus, Muhammad, or Moses—were contradictory.

Paine stayed on in France for the next seven years, fearing arrest if he went to England or seizure on the high seas were he to attempt to return to the United States. He maintained his position of respect, even presenting various plans to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had come to power following the successive downfalls of the Girondists, Jacobins, and the Directory. In 1797 Paine published Agrarian Justice, his last major work. Emblazoned on the title page was the proposition that every person at age twenty-one should receive fifteen pounds sterling “to enable HIM or HER to begin the World!” (p.