The Age of Reason is remembered as atheism and opens with a creed: I believe in one God, and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. Paine wrote the first part in Paris in 1793 with the Terror closing around him, finishing, by his own account, only hours before his arrest, and composed much of it without a Bible to hand, quoting from memory; the second part, written after ten months in the Luxembourg prison and a near escape from the guillotine, supplied the missing citations at devastating length. The argument is deist, not godless: the created world is the only authentic word of God, science its true theology, and revelation delivered to one person becomes mere hearsay the moment it is repeated to a second. What made the book uniquely dangerous was neither its doctrine, which gentlemen had held privately for a century, nor its originality, but its price and its prose: cheap editions in plain English put the critique of scripture into the hands of artisans, which is why Britain prosecuted its printers for decades.
America never forgave him. The friend of Washington and author of Common Sense returned in 1802 to ostracism, was refused the vote at New Rochelle, and died in 1809 with a handful of mourners; even a decade later, when Cobbett dug up his bones to carry them home in honour, the gesture collapsed into farce. Paine had staked everything on the difference between deism and atheism, and discovered that his countrymen declined to draw it.