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A desire for a more active and adventurous life led him, shortly after, to ship on board a British privateer, the celebrated ship "The Terrible," commanded by Captain Death. But his father, fearing to lose his son, and being opposed to wars, as a part of his religious faith, made such an appeal to his youthful feelings, as induced him to return home, and lay aside, for a time, his warlike

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Of the heart-life of this man we have no history. There an,
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that his emis pathetic reader. He was married in 1759, at the prof
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usurpations and plunderings of wealth; and while his writings against superstition and priestcraft, brought upon him the hatred of sectarians, his Essay on Agrarian Justice offended the wealthy and aristocratic. But Paine, like every other man who is in advance of his own age, must look for justice to posterity.

The publication of the Rights of Man in England, brought upon Paine the prosecution of the Crown; but while he was waiting the result of a trial, he was informed by an embassy from France, that he had been elected, with several other distinguished personages, a citizen of the French Republic, and also by the citizens of Calais, a member of the National Convention. Called to this new field of labor, he left England, and published an address accepting the honor of citizenship, and the post of Representative. He was a member of the Convention, in that stormy period; he voted and spoke in favor of the trial of Louis XVI., but his humanity revolted at the idea of unnecessary bloodshed, and he earnestly opposed the execution of the King, and asked, as a favor to America, that he might be permitted to come to this country, and end his days in peace. This brave effort to save a human life, and the life of a King, caused his own imprisonment, in the reign of terror, and his own condemnation to the guillotine, from which he providentially escaped. I say providentially, for such was his own belief.

We come now to a consideration of that portion of the life and work of this extraordinary man, which has doomed him to the calumnies and execrations of the ignorant and fanatical; but which, when truly examined, will be considered as honorable and useful as any portion of his career. He had been the instrument of Providence, in the birth of the Great Republic; he had struck a blow at Hereditary Rule, and the Divine Rights of Kingly Despotisms in Europe, from which they can never recover. He had now another war to wage with intolerance, bigotry, and religious proscription and persecution.

Thomas Paine was a religious man. Born a Quaker, while free from sectarian creeds, he inherited a spiritual impressibility. He was a man of intuitions. In our day he would be called a Spiritualist he would be claimed as a MEDIUM.

This is not mere assertion-his writings contain abundant evidence of all I assert. First, of what I term his mediumship, or susceptibility to spiritual impressions, I quote a paragraph from the Age of Reason, in which he says:

"There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts; those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord. I have always made it a rule to treat those voluntary visitors with civility, taking care to examine, as well as I was able, if they were worth entertaining; and it is from them that I have acquired about all the knowledge I possess."

Mr. Paine had his religious convictions, and he was faithful to them. He intended to write a work on religion, to devote to it his matured powers, and to publish it toward the close of his life, making his dying testimony an evidence of the sincerity of his opinions. But the Reign of Terror, that inversion of the Revolution, whose internal history has never yet been truly written, by making his death probable at any time, hastened this work. He could not leave the world without bearing his testimony; consequently, in France, with the guillotine flashing death upon him; with his friends falling on the right and the left, and his own life in imminent peril, he sat down to compose the "AGE OF REASON." Let us take his own solemn declaration of the motives of that work. The people of France, he says, oppressed for ages by religious superstition and despotism, were rushing into the opposite extreme of a blank atheism. Paine wrote the Age of Reason, to prove the existence of a God and immortality; and I know of no work extant, in which these two articles of his creed are more powerfully and convincingly sustained.

He wrote the first part of the Age of Reason, including the criticisms on the Old and New Testament, without a Bible or Testament to refer to; hurried by the prospect of the threatening guillotine; and six hours after it was finished, he was arrested. He gave the manuscript into the hands of Mr. Barlow, on his way to prison, that it might not be lost. If there ever was a dying testimony, this is one, for his death seemed inevitable.

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RESIDENT-LADIES AND GENTLEMEN :-I have accepted sure and with pride, the honorable position your committee ned me. It might have been entrusted to one better able to e to the demands of this occasion; but the honor could not en conferred upon any one who would appreciate it more or who could feel more anxiety to perform worthily the auty of rescuing from the darkness of ignorance, the blight ry, and the calumnies of creed-bound sectarians, the fame of who has done more than to "fill the measure of his country's

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one who has been a hero and a martyr in the cause of nd religious liberty throughout the world.

spond cordially, therefore, to the summons to address you on ccasion, and to the sentiments expressed in the preamble and tions, inviting you to join in this celebration; and I, a ger here, congratulate you upon the liberality, freedom, and ce, which have prompted your noble response to that invita

congratulate Cincinnati, Queen City of the West, that she has mind and heart, the manly courage and nobility of soul, to der this tribute of justice to one of the great unappreciated heroes humanity. I congratulate the Great West upon the spirit of edom that breathes over her prairies, and flows onward with

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