Treatise on the Gods (1930) 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 (1934). 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 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, "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