Free Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser Page A

a good reporter.
    This made Paine important to Lincoln the future writer and speaker. Lincoln already knew how to tell stories; Paine showed him how to make and win arguments.
    Paine’s knack for ridicule made him particularly useful to Lincoln, who already had the knack himself. Paine could nail down his points with similes that fixed them in the memory. He called the Book of Jeremiah “a medley of unconnected anecdotes”—then added, “as if the various and contradictory accounts that are to be found in a bundle of newspapers . . . were put together without date, order,or explanation.” Paine could turn ideas he did not like into slapstick, by means of speed and concreteness. Christians, he wrote, accepted “the amphibious idea of a man-god; the corporeal idea of the death of a god; the mythological idea of a family of gods; and the christian system of arithmetic, that three is one,and one is three.”
    At his funniest Paine used the reductio ad absurdum , taking an idea and pushing it until the consequences become ludicrous. Paine’s bugaboo, the story of Christ dying for our sins, became this when placed in an astronomical context: “Are we to suppose that every world, in the boundless creation, had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God . . . would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death, with scarcely a momentaryinterval of life.”
    It took Lincoln a while to master these techniques—humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix—but as a mature debater and speechmaker he would use them all. In the 1850s, he would argue that his rivals had become too casual about slavery: they “cease speaking of it as in any way wrong, [they] regard slavery as one of the common matters of property, and speak of negroes as we do of ourhorses and cattle.” The first two phrases defined the problem; the simile of the third planted it on the family farm. When rivals accused him of being in favor of race mixing, he protested that just because he did not want a black woman for a slave did not mean he desired her for a wife. “I need not have her for either. I can justleave her alone.” Here he demolished an argument with concreteness, cutting through lurid fears with a plain personal reaction. As president, he defended onerous wartime measures with the reductio ad absurdum : Americans were no more likely to maintain them in peacetime than a sick man would “persist in feedingupon . . . emetics” once he became well. All these techniques are related to the stretching and teasing of good storytelling—to the Man of Audacity milking his own embarrassment. But Paine and the older Lincoln used them to poke holes in the arguments of their enemies.
    They are common techniques that Lincoln could have picked up in many places. Jonathan Swift was a master of this kind of mockery, and Gulliver’s Travels was a classic that was in print all during Lincoln’s life. We could easily call Lincoln’s exercises in this style of humor Swiftian—except for one thing. There is no indication that Lincoln ever read Swift, or even mentioned him, Gulliver or Lilliput. Paine was the mocking humorist he did read.

    Lincoln would retain traces of Paine’s style for much of his life, but there was a barrier between him and the author of The Age of Reason that prevented him from becoming a full-fledged Paine-ite. That was Paine’s optimism.
    Paine believed that studying the world would demonstrate God’s “MUNIFICENCE” (all caps) because he believed that the world was a good place. “Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we were born—a world furnished to our hands that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun; that pour down the rain; and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universestill goes on.” Paine is like Augustine Washington in