Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - December - 2005 Issue
William Reese Gives Us That Old Tyme Religion
It's a genuine 'John Hancock' signature, even if it doesn't look like one.
By 1687, Penn was a more mature and accepting individual. His colony of Pennsylvania would attract many settlers with less conventional beliefs because of its tolerance. In that year he published, Good Advice to the Church of England, Roman Catholick, and Protestant Dissenter. Herein he argues for toleration on both religious and ethical principles. This is more the Penn we remember. Item 136. $2,500.
William Penn would go on to express even more liberal views in the mid-19th century, some 130 years after his death. Huh? You can check out his much later views in Voices from the Spirit World, Being Communications from Many Spirits. By the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. You can also check out updated views from the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Voltaire, as well as other early Quakers. The introduction was "written" by Benjamin Franklin. Post was an upstate New York reformer. He was deeply involved with abolitionism and women's rights, at times hosting Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth in his Rochester home. He became disillusioned with the more moderate opposition of traditional Quakers, and, with many others, split from them. Around 1850, he became a believer in Spiritualism, communicating with the dead, a movement started by two teenage sisters from nearby Hydesville. The sisters would recant their claims many years later (long after Post's death), but a belief in Spiritualism lives on. In 1851, when Post published his book, many who promoted abolition and other liberal causes also became believers in Spiritualism. Not surprisingly, the messages Post received from the long-dead Penn supported Post's views. Despite his strong antislavery principles, Post would oppose the Civil War. His Quaker pacifism prevailed. Nonetheless, he would live to see slavery abolished. Item 137. $600.
From his post-Earthly existence writings, we turn to some of Ben Franklin's earliest work. Actually, this is neither one of his writings or printings. It is even earlier than that. In 1725, young Franklin was working as a typesetter in England. He set type for the third edition of The Religion of Nature Delineated, by William Wollaston. In his autobiography, Franklin states he worked on the second edition, but evidently it must have been the third as Franklin did not begin work at Palmer's, the printer, until after the second was published. Item 71. $500.
Here is another religious text notable more for circumstances surrounding it than what is inside. The book is, A Lecture on Christ's Second Coming 70 A.D., published in Hartford in 1878. Reese describes the book as an "odd bit of revelation," and we'll go with that, never having read the book. Indeed, Reese adds that it displays the "imbalance of mind" which would lead its author, Charles Guiteau, to assassinate the President three years later. His shooting of President Garfield was also divinely inspired, at least in Guiteau's warped mind. Guiteau expected to be acquitted, but was sorely disappointed. He was hanged the following year, hardly the first religious writer to meet such a fate. However, he remains the first and only combination American Presidential assassin and author. Item 80. $400.
