CHAPTER V.
_"Tom Paine, Infidel."_ ...

These are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it _now_, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman....
I have as little superstition in me as any man living; but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent.--"The Crisis." I want you to note carefully the title of this chapter.

And then I want you to note still more carefully the quotation with which it opens.

It was the man known far and wide as "the infidel,"-- the man who was denounced by church-goers, and persecuted for his unorthodox doctrines,--who wrote with such high and happy confidence of a fair, a just and a merciful God Almighty.
Before me lies a letter from W.M.van der Weyde, the president of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association.