Chapter 30 29. Tom Payne

Somewhere there is a hymn to the effect that God works mysteriously and works miracles. The truth of this statement is obvious to anyone who has studied the history of the Atlantic seaboard. In the first fifty years of the seventeenth century, a group of people who worshiped the ideals of the "Old Testament" lived in the northern part of the American continent. Visitors who did not know the inside story would regard them as followers of Moses rather than followers of Christ.Cut off from the nations of Europe by the wide, cold, choppy Atlantic, these pioneers established a terror of spiritual dominion on the American continent, which culminated in the mass hunt and persecution of the Mather family.

At first glance, it seems impossible to attribute any credit to these venerable gentlemen for the tendencies of tolerance which the Constitution of the United States and many other documents before the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and the former colonies Li made it clear again.The fact is that the repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was bound to produce a strong reaction more favorable to free thought. That's not to say that all the colonialists are suddenly sending someone to Sozny's anthology and stop scaring kids with stories of Sinland and Sin City.But their leaders are almost all representatives of new ideas, they are all capable and strategic people, and their own ideas of tolerance are all built on the basis of the sheepskin declaration, and the building of a new independent nation will be built on it. rise.

It wouldn't be as successful if they were against a unified country.But establishing settlements in the North of America has always been complicated.The Swiss Lutherans cleared some of the land, the French sent some Huguenots, the Dutch Aminites took a large chunk of land, and the English denominations wanted to claim land in Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Find your own little paradise in the wilderness in between. This is conducive to the development of various religions. There is a good balance between different religions. In any case, they must slit each other's throats. For respectable gentlemen who made their fortunes out of pocket money, this development was a nasty one.Years after the new spirit of benevolence, they still fought to maintain the old ideal of integrity.Although they gained nothing, they succeeded in alienating the young from a creed that seemed to have been borrowed from the concept of benevolence and benevolence of its wilder Indian neighbors.

Fortunately for our country, in this long struggle for freedom, it is the few but courageous opponents who are most attacked. Ideas travel with such a brisk pace that even a small eighty-ton brig is enough to spread new insights that throw an entire continent into turmoil.Eighteenth-century American colonialists had little sculpture and grand pianos, but they had no shortage of books.The wise men in the thirteen colonies are beginning to understand that the great world is being shaken, which is not heard in the Sunday sermons.The booksellers of that time became their prophets.Although they did not break away from the existing priests openly, and their life on the surface did not change much, but when the time came, they immediately stated that they were the most loyal believers of the old Crown Prince of Transylvania, who refused to persecute Unitarianism. A subject, on the grounds that God has expressly given him power to do three things: "the power to create from nothing, to know the future, and to rule the conscience of man."

When it came time to formulate a concrete political and social program for governing the country in the future, these brave patriots put their ideas into the papers.Put ideals before the supreme court of public opinion. The good citizens of Virginia would be horrified out of their wits if they knew that some of the speeches to which they listened were directly manipulated by sworn enemies—free thinkers.However, Thomas Jefferson, the most successful statesman himself, was a man of very liberal views. When he said that religion can only be governed by reason and persuasion, not by force or violence, when he said that all people have the same When the right freely uses religion according to his conscience, he is merely repeating the thought and writings of previous Voltaire, Belle, Spinoza, and Erasmus.

Then people heard such heresies as: "It is not necessary to proclaim one's faith as a condition of seeking any public office in the United States"; and agreed to this approach. In this way, the United States became the first country where religion and politics were clearly separated, the first country where candidates for public office did not have to show their Sunday graduation certificates when they accepted appointments, and the first country where people were legally free to believe or not to believe religious country. But here, as in Austria (or other such places), the common people are far behind the leaders, and they can't keep up if the leaders stray a little from the old way.Not only do many states continue to impose restrictions on people who do not belong to the dominant religious organization, but people in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia continue to tolerate dissent as if they have never read a sentence of their own constitutions.For Tom Payne, it didn't take long for all of this to befall him.

Tom Payne has done a great service to the cause of America. He was a propagandist for the American Revolutionary War. He was English by blood, sailor by trade, and a rebel by nature and training.He was forty years old when he visited the colonies.While in London, he met Benjamin Franklin, who accepted the proposal to "go west".In 1774, with a letter of introduction written by Benjamin himself, he set sail for Philadelphia to help Franklin's son-in-law, Richard Bech, establish the "Philadelphia Gazette". Tom, a seasoned amateur politician, soon finds himself in the midst of a major soul-testing vortex.But his mind is very organized.He has collected the messy material about American discontent and rolled it into a small booklet that is short but lovingly written.The pamphlet serves to convince people through common "common sense" that the American cause is just and deserves the cooperation of all loyal patriots.

Immediately the pamphlet spread to England and to the Continent, and many knew for the first time that there was an "American nation" who had every reason and sacred duty to wage war on the mother country. Immediately after the Revolutionary War, Penn returned to Europe to tell the British people the folly of the government that ruled them.Terrible things were going on on both sides of the Seine at that time, and respectable Englishmen began to watch the situation on the other side of the channel with very suspicious eyes. A frightened man named Edmund Burke has just published "Opinions on the French Revolution."Payne immediately responded with an outraged "Rights of Man," and the British government ordered that he should be tried for treason.

Meanwhile, his French admirers elected him to Congress.Payne, who knew nothing of French but was an optimist, accepted the honor and came to Paris.Here he lived until Robespierre suspected him.Knowing that he could be arrested or beheaded at any moment, Payne hurriedly finished a book on his philosophy of life.The book was called The Age of Reason, and the first part was published when he was about to go to prison.The second part was completed during his ten months in prison. Payne believed that true religion, which he called "the religion of humanity," had two enemies, atheism and fanaticism.But he was attacked for expressing this idea, and when he returned to America in 1802, he was treated with such hatred that he became a "dirty and despicable atheist" until his death. It continued for more than a century.

It was true that nothing had happened to him, neither hanged, burned, nor dismembered on wheels.It's just that everyone ignored him, and when he had the courage to go out, everyone encouraged the children to stick out their tongues at him. When he died, he had become a person who was spurned and forgotten.He vented his anger by writing silly pamphlets against other heroes of the Revolutionary War. It seems like the most unfortunate ending for a good start. But this is a typical thing that has happened repeatedly in nearly two thousand years of history. No sooner has the public intolerance exhausted its anger than the private intolerance begins again.

Official executions were over, and lynchings were back.