Read as an Atheist, and the Matter of His Bones

The Age of Reason is a deist tract that spends much of its length arguing for the existence of God from the evidence of creation. Paine opens by professing belief in one God and hope for happiness beyond this life, and his objection to the churches is that they stand between people and a creator they could otherwise read directly in nature.

It was received as atheism anyway, and the reception is the historically significant fact. The book appeared while the French Revolution was making any attack on established religion look like an attack on order; it was prosecuted for blasphemous libel in England, its publishers imprisoned; and it cost Paine most of the standing that Common Sense and Rights of Man had won him. Theodore Roosevelt was still calling him a filthy little atheist a century later. He died in New York in 1809 with six people at his funeral, having been refused burial in a Quaker cemetery.

The end of the story is genuinely odd and is usually told wrong. In 1819 William Cobbett, who had once attacked Paine and later became an admirer, dug up the remains and shipped them to England intending a monument and a proper reburial. He never built it. The bones passed with his effects after his death in 1835 and were lost. Various skulls and hands have been claimed since; none is authenticated. There is no grave.