[Rarebooks] fa: THOMAS PAINE The Age of Reason PHILADELPHIA: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BACHE, 1796

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

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THOMAS PAINE - THE AGE OF REASON - PHILADELPHIA 1796
Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason. Part the Second. Being an  
Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology. By Thomas Paine,  
author of the works entitled Common sense,—Rights of man, part first  
and second,—the first part of The age of reason,—and Dissertations on  
first principles of government. [Philadelphia] : Printed [by Benjamin  
Franklin Bache] for the Booksellers., MDCCXCVI [1796]. Disbound  
pamphlet, small 8vo (21 cm); vii + [1] + 100 pp.; with the half-title.  
Evans 30942.

Written in response to the institutionalized atheism of revolutionary  
France, Thomas Paine's Age of Reason was an impassioned but "rational"  
defense of Deism. This second, entirely self-contained, part is  
primarily an attack on the abuses and excesses of the Christian  
church. First published in 1795 in Paris while he was imprisoned in  
Luxembourg, Paine had copies of the second part printed and shipped to  
Benjamin Franklin Bache in Philadelphia but they took nearly seven  
months to arrive, and in the meantime a pirated edition had already  
appeared, taken from Symond's pirated London edition. Bache  
(1769-1798), journalist, editor, printer and gadfly, was the grandson  
of Benjamin Franklin, with whom he had spent time as a boy in Paris.  
Inheriting his grandfather's printing equipment upon Franklin's death  
in 1790, Bache founded and edited the Aurora, a rabidly anti- 
Federalist newspaper in which he attacked the administrations of  
Washington and Adams. In 1798, Bache was arrested under the Sedition  
Act, but died of yellow fever at the age of twenty-nine before being  
brought to trial.