The Irish orator, Charles Phillips, who was a contemporary of Tom Paine, but outlived him, once gave utterance in a speech to the following sentiments:

      I must see better authority than Fleet Street Temple before I forego the principles which at once guard and consecrate and sweeten social intercourse; which give life, happiness, and death, hope; which constitute man's purity, his best protection, placing the infant's cradle and the female couch under the sacred shelter of the national morality. Neither Mr. Paine nor Mr. Palmer, nor all the venom-breathing brood, shall swindle from me the Book where I have learned these precepts. In spite of all their scoff and scorn and menacing, I say of the sacred volume they would obliterate, it is a book of facts, as well authenticated as any heathen history; a book of miracles incontestably avouched; a book of prophecy confirmed by past as well as present fulfillment; a book of poetry pure and natural and elevated even to inspiration; a book of morals such as human wisdom never framed for the perfection of human happiness. My Lord, I will abide by the precepts, admire the beauty, revere the mysteries, and, as far as in me lies, practice the mandates of the sacred volume; and should the ridicule of earth and the blasphemy of hell assail me, I shall console myself by the contemplation of those blessed spirits who, in the same blessed cause, have toiled and shone and suffered. In the "goodly fellowship of the saints," in the noble army of martyrs, in the society of the great and good and wise of every nation, if my sinfulness be not cleansed and my darkness illuminated at least my pretensionless submission may be excused. If I err with [290] the luminaries I have chosen for my guide, I confess myself captivated by the loveliness of their aberrations; if they err, it is in a heavenly region; if they wander, it is in fields of light; if they aspire, it is, at all events, a glorious daring; and, rather than sink with infidelity into the dust, I am content to cheat myself with their vision of eternity. It may, indeed, be nothing but a delusion, but then I err with the disciples of philosophy and virtue; with men who have drunk deep at the fountain of human knowledge, but who dissolved not the pearl of their salvation in the draught. I err with Bacon, the great confidant of nature, fraught with all the learning of the past, and almost prescient of the future, yet too wise not to know his weakness, and too philosophic not to feel his ignorance. I err with Locke, whose pure philosophy taught him to adore its source, whose warm love of genuine liberty never chilled into rebellion against its author. I err with Milton, rising on an angel's wing to heaven, and, like the bird of morn, soaring out of sight amidst the music of his grateful piety. I err with Newton, whose starlit spirit shot across the darkness of the sphere too soon to reascend to the home of his nativity. With men like these, my Lord, I shall remain in error, nor shall I desert these errors for the drunken bed of a Paine, or the delirious warwhoop of the surviving friends who would erect his altar upon the ruins of society. In my opinion, it is difficult to say whether their tenets are more ludicrous or more detestable. They will not obey the king, the prince, the parliament, nor the constitution, but they will obey anarchy. They will not believe in the prophets, in Moses, in the apostles, in Christ, but they believe in Tom Paine.

[SEBC 290-291]