[2] 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 scientist."
By the end of its first year, Treatise had sold thirteen thousand copies.
"[3] At the request of its original publisher Alfred A Knopf, Mencken wrote a revised edition (1946); among other changes, it eliminated a controversial quote about Jews: A year after publication, The New York Times published another review, this one by Philip Wylie and accompanied by a caricature of Mencken by Miguel Covarrubias.