The best thing Mark Twain ever said was, "I should like to see the
ballot in the hands of every woman." Freethinkers should also remember
him with gratitude; he said enough from our point of view to warrant
that. "Give me my glasses," were his last words. It will be but a short
time before some pious evangelical hypocrite will add, "I want to
read my Bible!" They are already writing about his "highest sphere of
thought," namely, his religious thought.
I remember when a Presbyterian deacon said of him, "I would rather
bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow." The church
people are all anxious to avoid their own history concerning Mark Twain
and many other people.
The Reverend Doctor Twitchell said at Mark's funeral that a simple soul
had gone trustingly to the beyond. He didn't mention where the beyond
was, and he prayed to the Christian God that courage in the faith of
immortality be given to those who mourn.
Through all these Christian notices runs an undercurrent that Mark
Twain was only secondarily a humorist. I knew him somewhat in the old
days and have heard him lecture. He certainly laughed superstition from
the minds of thousands, and the most of his books bear witness to his
broad and liberal views.
The Reverend Doctor Van Dyke mixed much religious sophistry with
his remarks at the funeral of Twain, but the reverend doctor is a
theological acrobat.
He preached once on the Atonement, and said there are a thousand
true doctrines of the Atonement, which is saying substantially that
no doctrine specifically is true--for instance, the doctrine of the
Westminster Confession, to which Van Dyke pledged loyalty when he
was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He at that time ripped up the
Westminster settlement, and reopened the whole question for discussion.
Any preacher who believes in the geology of Moses, the astronomy of
Joshua, and the mathematics of the Trinity, must do an immense amount
of "side-stepping."
_Christianity is only a bubble of superstition, and Jesus is
reduced to a toy god of the Sunday School._