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Richard Watson, An Apology for the Bible addressed to Thomas Paine, N.Y.: T. & J. Swords 1796. The author of this response to Paine s Age of Reason was an Anglican priest and educator who served as the Bishop of Llandaff from 1782 to 1816 and was the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University commencing in 1771. This professorship dates back to 1540 and is among the oldest. This famously anti-Paine tract is an important part of any Thomas Paine collection. The original hardcover is worn but intact and all pages are in fine shape. No handwriting observed. Some have mistakenly labeled Paine a Quaker. His mother was Anglican, his father a Quaker who presumably instilled in Thomas some notions, but Paine was famously an outspoken, unrepentant deist. Age of Reason reflected the enlightenment thinking and science of the late 18th century, ergo, it was an attack upon organized religion, the worship of any human-embodied divinity, and thus the clergy. On January 10, 1776, a month before he turned 39, Paine exploded onto the transatlantic stage as the foremost advocate of obtaining liberty for the colonies by fighting the British. Paine himself commented that any literary talent he might have had was buried in me and might ever have continued so, had not the necessity of the times dragged and driven him to write. (The Crisis, No. VIII, ¶6.) Historians credit Paine s 1776 publication of Common Sense, which he allowed others to reprint, with galvanizing public opinion for independence which led to the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the United States becoming an independent non-monarchical nation. Paine s importance to the cause was cemented by the first and subsequent issues of The Crisis which George Washington had read aloud to the beleaguered army he commanded. Without Paine s pen, the war might well have been lost almost as soon as it began. Seller Inventory # 14
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