Another historian has written of the effects of the Second Great Awakening as a whole (although not specifically of Nettleton): "Could Thomas Paine, the free-thinking pamphleteer of the American and French Revolutions, have visited Broadway in 1865, he would have been amazed to find that the nation conceived in rational liberty was 'in the grip of' the power of evangelical faith. The emancipating glory of the great awakenings had made Christian liberty, Christian equality and Christian fraternity the passion of the land. The treasured gospel…passed into the hands of the baptized many. Common grace, not common sense, was the keynote of the age… Religious doctrines which Paine, in his book "The Age of Reason", had discarded as the “tattered vestment” of the past, became the wedding garment of many."