As his literary advisor and most perceptive friend later observed, “There are no more vital passages in his fiction than those which embody character as it is affected for good as well as evil by the severity of the local Sunday schooling and church going (William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain, p. Richmond’s spiritual care and out of those few years and fond memories came the seeds of a remarkable literature. For the nearly three years he attended the Old Ship of Zion, Sam remained under Mr. “He was a very kindly and considerate Sunday School teacher,” Sam recalled more than half a century later, “and he was never hard on me” ( Writings, 37:214). The first Sunday School Sam attended in Hannibal, Missouri, was held in the then newly finished Methodist church known as “the Old Ship of Zion,” and the teacher of Sam’s class there was a stonemason by the name of Richmond. In my nightmares I gasped and struggled for breath under the crush of that vast book for many a night. įor the most part, he gasped and struggled under the crush of it for most of his life. In all that throng of gaping and sympathetic onlookers there was not one with common sense enough to perceive that an anvil would have been in better taste there than the Bible, less open to sarcastic criticism and swifter in its atrocious work. adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. The shooting down of poor Smarr in the Main Street at noonday supplied me with dreams and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture-the great family Bible spread open upon the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot. This religious preoccupation and subsequent struggle is brilliantly if unwittingly posed in that earliest boyhood image of the ponderous word of God suffocating an already dying man. As his closest minister-friend, Joseph Twitchell, once said, Sam Clemens was too orthodox on the doctrine of total human depravity. A compulsive guilt seeker, he blamed himself for at least the deaths of a brother, a son, and a daughter, and he finally despised the human race because it included men like himself. Fear, punishment, conscience, duty, the hand of God, death-these were the staples in his moral pantry. He named his house cats, rather apocalyptically, Famine, Pestilence, Satan, and Sin he thought the height of confidence was a Christian with four aces smugness was a friend waiting for a vacancy in the trinity and so on ad infinitum-or, for him, ad nauseum. But he did have a soul gripped by the Puritan fathers, a grip which relentlessly affected his moods and his metaphors. Unlike his friend William Dean Howells, who worried a great deal about the difference between a Unitarian and a Universal, Twain did not have a mind turned to fine theological distinctions. Twain frequently called his religious life “Presbyterianism,” the faith of his mother’s family, but that label became for him a kind of shoebox repository into which he shoved everything from the faith John Knox espoused to the most nebulous sort of Christian belief. It is of that early period, completed before he was 50 years old, that I wish to speak. Nevertheless, the early years-the western years as it were-are crucial to any real understanding of Twain’s attitude toward religion, revealing moments of a remarkable religious experience and providing the backdrop against which those last decades, so full of financial strife and personal tragedy, must be seen. When discussing Mark Twain’s religious attitudes, his biographers have characteristically focused on the last decades of his life, those final, frustrating years in which Twain said going to church gave him dysentery.
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