The Age of Reason. Part the Second. Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology.

“Part I of the Age of Reason was written in Paris in 1793— in haste, because although Paine had originally been lionized by the French as a true ally in the cause of liberté, égalité, fraternité, he soon became disillusioned by the increasing violence of the revolution. When Paine declared his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, he placed his own life in imminent danger. Arrested on Robespierre’s order, Paine was able to deliver the manuscript to his friend Joel Barlow, who was also a close friend of Jefferson’s, while en route to the Luxembourg Prison on December 28, 1793. In one of the more disgraceful manifestations of ingratitude by any American administration, Paine was left for more than nine months to rot in prison… Only when the freethinking James Monroe replaced Gouverneur Morris as minister to France did the American government exert its influence to obtain Paine’s freedom. Paine wrote Part II of The Age of Reason while recovering from his severe ulcerative illness in Monroe’s home” (Jacoby, Freethinkers). “Ignored by the French, the book was extraordinarily successful in Britain and America… In England, The Age of Reason rapidly became a bestseller, in spite of the government’s decision to prosecute any bookseller that would circulate it. The book had to be printed and sold underground… In the United States, demand was even more frenetic… Although Paine’s work had originally been composed to keep the French from ‘running headlong into atheism,’ it was immediately referred to, in the English-speaking world, as the ‘Devil’s Prayer-Book’ or ‘the Bible of Atheism.’ The Age of Reason was not the first critique of the Biblical text to be published during the Age of Enlightenment, but it was the first one to have been written in such simple and direct language, larded with wit, humor, verve, cheek…, a clever mixture of popular common sense and scientific analysis that could be easily grasped by the mass of ordinary people” (Vincent, Transatlantic Republican, 14-15).