Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1150

Speech in commemoration of Thomas Paine, rolled together with Item 1149e. Possibly written for the celebration of Thomas Paine’s birthday held at the Washington Secular League, Washington DC, January 31, 1904

Thomas Paine

When we look back upon the life of a man who has made so firm an impress upon the world as he whose memory we celebrate today, we are sometimes prone to yield to a sentiment which magnifies the minor details of his life — details which in reality are as commonplace as the lives of other men.

There are others who can tell of his pedigree, his education, his travels, and perhaps his personal appearance and habits. For the present, let us look to see for what he is distinguished from other men — for the real quality of his greatness.

Is it not that he was a center of intellectual and moral force? — a flame from the real underlying heart of mankind breaking through the rigid crusts of superstition and ignorance?

But how cheap is praise, when it costs us nothing, and the giving of it so subtly flatters our own fine discernment.

Perhaps we would have been as ready to praise him in his day. We may even regret that he is not here now to receive our homage. But his purposes and ideals are here, and we may honor him most when his name is least upon our lips.

 

Do we admire him merely as a man that was and is no more? I say that what we praise in him is a thing that is never born and that never dies. It is not that as a man he was honest, strong and true, but it is that honesty and strength and truth were in him, and these things are what we really love and revere. We love the motive that impels a man who can say, “Where liberty is not, there my land is” — and who can act upon that sentiment. It makes a pretty picture — at a distance, safe from the smart of calumny and the imminent dungeon.

If it is the motive and not the man, the ideal and not the individual, if it is his power and not his personality that leads us to his shrine, we will pay a dearer reverence than mere platitudes of praise. And if the cost is great, then greater will be the recompense.

With all that he suffered, who would not envy the lot of Paine more than that of the clergymen who are said to have bargained to suppress his writings?

But why turn to the past for its contrasts? There is less of light than darkness there, and perhaps our present day is dim. Our age may yet be scorned for its boast of virtue. Not until we know its darkness can we see its light. The wise and holy sought to snuff out his fame because they did not or would not know their own darkness.

 

He who would do Paine true homage will do what he did. He will strike from his eyes the scales of superstitious reverence for what is. He will lift his mind from the narrow groove of training and conventionality. The world and its ways will appear before him as it will before posterity. That which is noble will stand out in bright relief. Seeing the truths that are hated in one age, to be honored in the next, his life may become a purpose that will live, and not a habit that will die. And he may perhaps join that great company of immortals among whom the future will point out no brighter star than Thomas Paine.