Editing Ethan Allen (section)

===Publication of ''Reason''===
[[File:Ethan Allen book.jpg|thumb|right|Allen's ''Reason'', at [[Center for Inquiry|CFI's Library]]]]In these years, Allen recovered from Thomas Young's widow, who was living in Albany, the manuscript that he and Young had worked on in his youth and began to develop it into the work that was published in 1785 as ''Reason: the Only Oracle of Man''. The work was a typical Allen polemic, but its target was religious, not political. Specifically targeted against [[Christianity]], it was an unbridled attack against the [[Bible]], established churches, and the powers of the priesthood. As a replacement for organized religion, he espoused a mixture of [[deism]], [[Spinoza]]'s naturalist views, and precursors of [[Transcendentalism]], with man acting as a free agent within the natural world. While historians disagree over the exact authorship of the work, the writing contains clear indications of Allen's style.<ref name="Jellison305_8">[[#Jellison|Jellison]], pp. 305–08</ref>

The book was a complete financial and critical failure. Allen's publisher had forced him to pay the publication costs up front, and only 200 of the 1,500 volumes printed were sold. (The rest were eventually destroyed by a fire at the publisher's house.) The theologically conservative future president of [[Yale University|Yale]], [[Timothy Dwight IV|Timothy Dwight]], opined that "the style was crude and vulgar, and the sentiments were coarser than the style.  The arguments were flimsy and unmeaning, and the conclusions were fastened upon the premises by mere force."<ref name="Jellison310">[[#Jellison|Jellison]], p. 310</ref> Allen took the financial loss and the criticism in stride, observing that most of the critics were clergymen, whose livelihood he was attacking.<ref name="Jellison311">[[#Jellison|Jellison]], p. 311</ref>