A Defence of Revelation — Elhanan Winchester

Full Title: A Defence of Revelation, in Ten Letters to Thomas Paine; Being an Answer to His First Part of The Age of Reason
Elhanan Winchester
Re-printed for the Editor by T. Gillet · London · 1796
First London Edition · First Printing

The Pamphlet:
The First London Edition · First Printing of Elhanan Winchester’s direct response to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, published in London in 1796 following an earlier New York printing. Structured as ten letters addressed to Paine himself, Winchester defended revelation and Christianity by entering the same public argument Paine had opened rather than demanding that his ideas simply disappear. This surviving eighteenth-century pamphlet retains its title page and evidence of original stab-sewn construction, but is incomplete, lacking the original self-wrapper(s) and final leaf/page(s).

Condition:
Good+. Disbound and incomplete. Surviving title page remains present and legible, with original period typography and evidence of stab-sewn construction visible along the left margin. Moderate age toning, scattered foxing, soiling, and edge wear consistent with an eighteenth-century ephemeral publication. Original self-wrapper(s) and final leaf/page(s) are lacking. No modern facsimile components or rebinding observed.

Story Of The Pamphlet

Thomas Paine attacked revelation. Elhanan Winchester answered him with ten letters and the same weapon Paine had used: print.

When the first part of The Age of Reason appeared in 1794, Paine challenged revelation, scripture, miracles, and institutional claims to religious truth. The response was enormous. Ministers, theologians, dissenters, and political radicals entered a transatlantic argument over whether reason would destroy revealed religion or ultimately vindicate it.

Winchester's position makes his response more interesting than a simple defense of orthodoxy. He was himself a religious dissenter—a Universalist preacher whose theology had already carried him beyond conventional Calvinism. Yet Paine went somewhere Winchester would not. In ten letters addressed directly to him, Winchester attempted to defend revelation within the expanding culture of public argument that Paine represented.

The exchange crossed the Atlantic. Winchester's work was first printed in New York; this 1796 London edition carried his answer back into the British world from which Paine himself had emerged.

Paine challenged Christianity in print. Winchester trusted Christianity enough to answer him there.

Why It’s In The Collection

A Defence of Revelation belongs in Consigned to Darkness because a culture of free expression is preserved not when everyone reaches the same conclusion, but when opposing conclusions are allowed to collide.

This collection contains another contemporary answer to Paine—Gilbert Wakefield's An Examination of the Age of Reason. Together, the pamphlets preserve something more valuable than agreement with Paine or his critics: the argument itself.

Paine challenged inherited religious authority. Winchester challenged Paine. All three men—Paine, Winchester, and Wakefield—participated in a print culture increasingly willing to place questions once settled by authority before the judgment of readers.

This surviving London edition is therefore not simply an old theological rebuttal. It is physical evidence of ideas moving between America and Britain while one of the eighteenth century's defining controversies was still alive.

The radical thing was not that Paine spoke. It was that everyone could answer.

Collection Categories: Religious Conscience · Free Expression · Political Dissent · Enlightenment · Intellectual History · Political Philosophy · Publication-Event Object

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Authentication Evidence

• Title page identifies the work as A Defence of Revelation, in Ten Letters to Thomas Paine; Being an Answer to His First Part of The Age of Reason by Elhanan Winchester.

• Title page explicitly states “First Printed at New-York: London: Re-printed for the Editor,” establishing this copy as a London reprinting following the earlier New York issue.

• Title page is dated 1796.

• Publisher/printer imprint identifies T. Gillet, Bartholomew Close, consistent with bibliographic records for the 1796 London edition.

• Listed London booksellers and imprint configuration correspond to the documented London issue.

• No evidence of a later printing, revised issue, or subsequent London edition is present in the surviving bibliographic evidence.

• Typography, paper, and visible letterpress characteristics are consistent with late-eighteenth-century production.

• Surviving stab-sewing evidence along the left margin is consistent with original eighteenth-century pamphlet construction.

• Original title page remains present.

• The surviving pamphlet is incomplete, lacking the original self-wrapper(s) and final leaf/page(s).

• Those losses affect completeness and condition but do not prevent identification of the surviving text as the 1796 First London Edition · First Printing.

• No evidence of modern photographic facsimile reproduction, modern reprint manufacture, or supplied modern leaves is observed.

• Observable physical, imprint, and bibliographic evidence supports authentication as the 1796 First London Edition · First Printing.