Born Again: A Novel (1904)

by Alfred William Lawson

The complete text of Lawson's first published work, issued by Wox, Conrad, Company Publishers, New York, 1904. Later editions published in the 1930s by Lawson's Humanity Publishing Company excised Chapter XI, a diatribe against organized religion, and deleted many pointed criticisms of religious worship and prayer, the Bible, the Church, and Christianity in general. For example, this edition concludes, "...henceforth I renounce all further allegiance to a religion that permits the strong to victimize the weak..."; in all later editions, the word "religion" is substituted with "financial civilization."

Influences likely included Bellamy's Looking Backward; Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antediluvian World and Caesar's Column; and the writings and speeches of noted agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll (Lawson managed the baseball team in Peoria, IL in 1900--a few months after Ingersoll died at his home in Peoria.)

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This digitization effort has also been uploaded to Project Gutenberg.