Tuesday, June 19, 1906

About the character of God, as represented in the New and the Old Testaments.

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our God with minute and remorseless exactness. The portrait is substantially that of a man—if one can imagine a man charged and overcharged with evil impulses far beyond the human limit; a personage whom no one, perhaps, would desire to associate with, now that Nero and Caligula are dead. in the old Testament His acts expose His vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. He is always punishing—punishing trifling misdeeds with thousand-fold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending populations for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs and sheep and bullocks, as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors. it is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading, by contrast.

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It begins with an inexcusable treachery, and that is the keynote of the entire biography. That beginning must have been invented in a pirate’s nursery, it is so malign and so childish. To Adam is forbidden the fruit of a certain tree—and he is gravely informed that if he disobeys he shall die. How could that be expected to impress Adam? Adam was merely a man in stature; in knowledge and experience he was in no way the superior of a baby of two years of age; he could have no idea of what the word death meant. He had never seen a dead thing; he had never heard of a dead thing before. The word meant nothing to him. If the Adam child had been warned that if he ate of the apples he would be transformed into a meridian of longitude, that threat would have been the equivalent of the other, since neither of them could mean anything to him.

The watery intellect that invented the memorable threat could be depended on to supplement it with other banalities and low grade notions of justice and fairness, and that is what happened. It was decreed that all of Adam’s descendants, to the latest day, should be punished for the baby’s trespass against a law of his nursery fulminated against him before he was out of his diapers. For thousands and thousands of years, his posterity, individual by individual, has been unceasingly hunted and harried with afflictions in punishment of the juvenile misdemeanor which is grandiloquently called Adam’s Sin. And during all that vast lapse of time, there has been no lack of rabbins and popes and bishops and priests and parsons and lay slaves eager to applaud this infamy, maintain the unassailable justice and righteousness of it, and praise its Author in terms of flattery so gross and extravagant that none but a God could listen to it and not hide His face in disgust and embarrassment. Hardened to flattery as our oriental potentates are, through long experience, not even they would be able to endure the rank quality of it which our God endures with complacency and satisfaction from our pulpits every Sunday.

We brazenly call our God the source of mercy, while we are aware, all the time, that there is not an authentic instance in history of His ever having exercised that virtue. We call Him the source of morals, while we know by His history and by His daily conduct, as perceived with our own senses, that He is totally destitute of anything resembling morals. We call Him Father, and not in derision, although we would detest and denounce any earthly father who should inflict upon his child a thousandth part of the pains and miseries and cruelties which our God deals out to His children every day, and has dealt out to them daily during all the centuries since the crime of creating Adam was committed.

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We deal in a curious and laughable confusion of notions concerning God. We divide Him in two, bring half of Him down to an obscure and infinitesimal corner of the world to confer salvation upon a little colony of Jews—and only Jews, no one else—and leave the other half of Him throned in heaven and looking down and eagerly and anxiously watching for results. We reverently study the history of the earthly half, and deduce from it the conviction that the earthly half has reformed, is equipped with morals and virtues, and in no way resembles the abandoned, malignant half that abides upon the throne. We conceive that the earthly half is just, merciful, charitable, benevolent, forgiving, and full of sympathy for the sufferings of mankind and anxious to remove them. Apparently we deduce this character not by examining facts, but by diligently declining to search them, measure them, and weigh them. The earthly half requires us to be merciful, and sets us an example by inventing a lake of fire and brimstone in which all of us who fail to recognize and worship Him as God are to be burned through all eternity. And not only we, who are offered these terms, are to be thus burned if we neglect them, but also the earlier billions of human beings are to suffer this awful fate, although they all lived and died without ever having heard of Him or the terms at all. This exhibition of mercifulness may be called gorgeous. We have nothing approaching it among human savages, nor among the wild beasts of the jungle. We are required to forgive our brother seventy times seven times, and be satisfied and content if on our death-bed, after a pious life, our soul escape from our body before the hurrying priest can get to us and furnish it a pass with his mumblings and candles and incantations. This example of the forgiving spirit may also be pronounced gorgeous.

We are told that the two halves of our God are only seemingly disconnected by their separation; that in very fact the two halves remain one, and equally powerful, notwithstanding the separation. This being the case, the earthly half—who mourns over the sufferings of mankind and would like to remove them, and is quite competent to remove them at any moment He may choose—satisfies Himself with restoring sight to a blind person, here and there, instead of restoring it to all the blind; cures a cripple, here and there, instead of curing all the cripples; furnishes to five thousand famishing persons a meal, and lets the rest of the millions that are hungry remain hungry—and all the time He admonishes inefficient man to cure these ills which God Himself inflicted upon him, and which He could extinguish with a word if He chose to do it, and thus do a plain duty which He had neglected from the beginning and always will neglect while time shall last. He raised several dead persons to life. He manifestly regarded this as a kindness if it was a kindness it was not just to confine it to a half a dozen persons. He should have raised the rest of the dead. I would not do it myself, for I think the dead are the only human beings who are really well off—but I merely mention it, in passing, as one of those curious incongruities with which our Bible history is heavily overcharged.

Whereas the God of the old Testament is a fearful and repulsive character, He is at least consistent. He is frank and outspoken. He makes no pretense to the possession of a moral or a virtue of any kind—except with His mouth. No such thing is anywhere discoverable in His conduct. I think He comes infinitely nearer to being respectworthy than does His reformed self, as guilelessly exposed in the new Testament. Nothing in all history—nor even His massed history combined—remotely approaches in atrocity the invention of hell.

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His heavenly self, His old Testament self, is sweetness and gentleness and respectability, compared with His reformed earthly self. In heaven He claims not a single merit, and hasn’t one—outside of those claimed by His mouth—whereas in the earth He claims every merit in the entire catalogue of merits, yet practised them only now and then, penuriously, and finished by conferring hell upon us, which abolished all His fictitious merits in a body.

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Thursday, August 30, 1906

Trouble with telephones-- Ms. Lyon's long distance message to Clara Clemens-- Mr. Scovel gives a clause of telephone law

I have mentioned an unfinished book which might be entitled “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” In the manuscript the story has no title, but begins with a pretty brusque remark by an ancient admiral, who is Captain Ned Wakeman under a borrowed name. This reminds me of something.

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Four or five months ago, in the New York home, I learned by accident that we had been having a good deal of trouble with our telephones. The family get more or less peace and comfort out of concealing vexations from me on account of the infirmities of my temper, and it would be only by accident that I could find out that the telephones were making trouble. Upon inquiry I discovered that my tribe had been following the world’s usual custom—they had applied for relief to the Telephone Company’s subordinates. This is always a mistake. The only right way is to apply to the President of a corporation; your complaint receives immediate and courteous attention then. I called up the headquarters and asked the President to send some one to my house to listen to a complaint. One of the chief superintendents came—Mr. Scovel. The complaint occupied but a minute of our time. Then he sat by the bed and we smoked and chatted half an hour very pleasantly. I remarked that often and often I would dearly like to use the telephone myself, but didn’t dare to do it because when the connection was imperfect I was sure to lose my temper and swear—and while I would like to do that, and would get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, I couldn’t venture it because I was aware that by telephone law the Company can remove your telephone if you indulge yourself in that way.

Mr. Scovel gladdened me by informing me that I could allow myself that indulgence without fear of injurious results, for there wouldn’t be any, there being a clause in the law which allowed me that valuable privilege. Then he quoted that clause and made me happy.

Two or three months ago I wanted that nameless manuscript heretofore mentioned, and I asked my secretary to call up my New York home on the long-distance and tell my daughter Clara to find that manuscript and send it to me. The line was not in good order, and Miss Lyon found great difficulty in making Clara understand what was wanted. After a deal of shouting back and forth Clara gathered that it was a manuscript that was wanted, and that she would find it among the manuscriptural riffraff in my study somewhere. Then she wanted to know by what sign she would recognize it. She asked for the title of it.

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Miss Lyon—using a volume of voice which should have carried to New York without the telephone’s help, said—

“It has no title. it begins with a remark.”

It took some time to make Clara understand that. Then she said,

“What is the remark?”

Miss Lyon shouted—

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“Tell him to go to hell.”

Clara. “Tell him to go—where?”

Miss Lyon. “To hell.”

Clara. “I can’t get it. Spell it.”

Miss Lyon. “H-E-L-L.”

Clara. “Oh, hell.”

I was troubled, not by the ear-splitting shouting, which I didn’t mind, but by the character of the words that were going over that wire and being listened to in every office on it, and for a moment I was scared and said,

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“Now they’ll take our telephone out, on account of this kind of talk.”

But the next moment I was comfortable again, because I remembered that blessed clause in the telephone law which Mr. Scovel had quoted to me, and which said:

“In employing our telephones no subscriber shall be debarred from using his native language.”

Extracted from "Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2" © 2001 by the Mark Twain Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Transcription, reconstruction, and emendation © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press on behalf of the Mark Twain Foundation."