Quotes from book
Treatise on the Gods

Name: Treatise on the Gods
Author: H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken

Treatise on the Gods is H. L. Mencken's survey of the history and philosophy of religion, and was intended as an unofficial companion volume to his Treatise on Right and Wrong . The first and second printings were sold out before publication, and eight more printings followed. Its first edition received a major 5-column review in the New York Times, written by one P.W. Wilson; and the Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks called it "the best popular account we have of the origin and nature of religion." However, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, claimed that "It is only in dealing with moral and social issues that [Mencken] achieves the heights of complete detachment, and in this case the detachment is that of a cynic rather than that of a scientist." By the end of its first year Treatise had sold thirteen thousand copies. By 1940 its popularity had waned, and although it went temporarily out of print in 1945, Mencken considered it "my best book, and by far." At the request of its original publisher Alfred A Knopf, Mencken wrote a revised edition , eliminating a controversial quote about Jews:

“To a clergyman lying under a vow of chastity any act of sex is immoral, but his abhorrence of it naturally increases in proportion as it looks safe and is correspondingly tempting. As a prudent man, he is not much disturbed by incitations which carry their obvious and certain penalties; what shakes him is the enticement bare of any probable secular retribution. Ergo, the worst and damndest indulgence is that which goes unwhipped. So he teaches that it is no sin for a woman to bear a child to a drunken and worthless husband, even though she may believe with sound reason that it will be diseased and miserable all its life, but if she resorts to any mechanical or chemical device, however harmless, to prevent its birth, she is doomed by his penology to roast in Hell forever, along with the assassin of orphans and the scoundrel who forgets his Easter duty.”

H.L. Mencken book Treatise on the Gods

Treatise on the Gods (1930; 2nd Edition 1946)
1930s