of Man (1784), but deism remained primarily a philosophy of the educated elite. Men such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson espoused its tenets but at the same time argued that religion served the useful purpose of "social control." It was not until the publication of Paine's more entertaining and popular work that deism reached into the middling and lower classes in America. The public was receptive, in part, because they approved of the secular ideals of the French Revolution. The Age of Reason went through 17 editions and sold thousands of copies in the United States. Elihu Palmer, "a blind renegade minister" and Paine's most loyal follower in America, promoted deism throughout the country. Palmer published what became "the bible of American deism", The Principles of Nature, established deistic societies from Maine to Georgia, built Temples of Reason throughout the nation, and founded two deistic newspapers for which Paine eventually wrote seventeen essays. Foner wrote, "The Age of Reason became the most popular deist work ever written ... Before Paine it had been possible to be both a Christian and a deist; now such a religious outlook became virtually untenable." Paine presented deism to the masses, and, as in Britain, educated elites feared the consequences of such material in the hands of so many. Their fear helped to drive the backlash which soon followed. Almost immediately after this deistic upsurge, the Second Great Awakening began. George Spater explains that "the revulsion felt for Paine's Age of Reason and for other anti-religious thought was so great that a major counter-revolution had been set underway in America before the end of the eighteenth century." By 1796, every student at Harvard was given a copy of Watson's rebuttal of The Age of Reason. In 1815, Parson Weems, an early American novelist and moralist, published God's Revenge Against Adultery, in which one of the major characters "owed his early downfall to reading 'PAINE'S AGE OF REASON'". Paine's "libertine" text leads the young man to "bold slanders of the bible" even to the point that he "threw aside his father's good old family bible, and for a surer guide to pleasure took up the AGE OF REASON!" Paine could not publish Part III of The Age of Reason in America until 1807 because of the deep antipathy against him. Hailed only a few years earlier as a hero of the American Revolution, Paine was