Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Roger Williams (1603–1683): Freeborn
- 2 Thomas Paine (1737–1809): Revolution
- 3 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902): Gender Wars
- 4 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963): American Apartheid
- 5 Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005): Betrayals and Bridges
- Notes
- Index
2 - Thomas Paine (1737–1809): Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Roger Williams (1603–1683): Freeborn
- 2 Thomas Paine (1737–1809): Revolution
- 3 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902): Gender Wars
- 4 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963): American Apartheid
- 5 Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005): Betrayals and Bridges
- Notes
- Index
Summary
When it shall be said in any country … “my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive … ”; when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.
– Thomas Paine, 1792England
The boy had an odd, unpleasant feeling as he exited the sanctuary. He could not quite put his finger on it – recently he had been experiencing the feeling more regularly when attending his mother's Anglican church.
Picking his way carefully down the churchyard steps, the boy was struck by an insight of such crystalline clarity that it stopped him in his tracks.
“The preacher says God Almighty is passionate and good,” he puzzled to himself. “And they say he killed his son to teach the people a lesson. But I am certain a man would be hanged if he did such a thing … So, it must be impossible that God, who is good, would have killed his son.”
For all his effort, young Thomas Paine could not imagine why ministers preached such frightening sermons, and at that moment on the garden steps, he decided that “any system of religion that has anything in it that 68 shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system” – a conviction Paine held for the rest of his days.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Radicals in their Own TimeFour Hundred Years of Struggle for Liberty and Equal Justice in America, pp. 68 - 128Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010