The present text is based upon a manuscript previously unpublished, DV263, the only extant phase. External evidence (see the Explanatory Notes) suggests that the date at the head—31 August 1909—was the actual date of composition. Mark Twain used a cream tablet paper, probably the “Pratt's” brand, for this and the next two works of this volume, “Letters from the Earth” and “ ‘The Turning Point of My Life’.” The pronoun “he” He (398.12), which refers to God, has been capitalized; one misspelling has been corrected, “dipth-theria” diphtheria (399.12).
[1909]
Augusta, Maine, Aug. 31.
To the Editor of Harper's Weekly.
My fellow-townsman, Kaufman, has tried to help the Scotsman. If I may try also, I will do the best I can.
Is God personal, or impersonal?
Nobody knows; but we can all join the pulpit, and guess. My guess is, that He is personal; that He is supreme, that He is limitlessly powerful, that He is all-knowing, and that He is the Creator of the universe and everything in it.
Is God the author of evil?
Necessarily, since He is the author of the conditions which produce it and make it unavoidable. And inasmuch as He created man—without man's consent or desire—He is responsible for everything man does and says between the cradle and the grave. He has no moral right to dictate to man what his conduct shall be. He has furnished man a large equipment of instincts, partialities, prejudices, magnanimities, generosities, and malignities, and it is man's moral right to do what he pleases with this equipment. As far as God is concerned. He cannot sin against God, he owes Him no allegiance, no obedience. God can compel him, yes, just as a strong man can compel a weak one to do things he is under no contract to do. But He cannot exercise this compulsion without [begin page 399] descending a long way below the moral grade of the average civilized human being.
Evil? There is a plenty of it here below—invented in heaven and sent down day and night by the giant cargo and prodigally distributed over an utterly innocent and unoffending world. For what purpose? That bright darling, the pulpit, says, to discipline man, and incline him to love his Maker. What a splendid idea! I doubt if there is a cow in the country that is intellectual enough to invent the match to it.
Every day the cargo comes down, with presents for us all—Christmas all the year round, as it were: cholera, mumps, chills, the Indian Black Death, diphtheria, small pox, scarlet fever, consumption, epilepsy, measles, whooping cough, pneumonia, blindness, lameness, deafness, dumbness, heart failure, apoplexy, hydrophobia, idiocy, insanity, palsy, lockjaw, boils, ulcers, cancers, lumbago, St. Vitus's dance, gout, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, nervous prostration, religion, catalepsy, dropsy, typhoid, malaria, the house-fly, the mosquito, the flea, the louse, appendicitis, meningitis, hunger, cold, poverty, grief, misery in a million forms, and thirty-eight billion hostile microbes in every man's lower intestine waiting to take a chance if the other inducements to holy living fail to catch the student out and hale him to the grave.
Christmas every day, as you see, and something for everybody. Isn't it a wonderful grab-bag? Invented in heaven, too, not in the other place. Have you ever been acquainted with a mere man who would consent to provide any one of these things for the instruction and improvement of his family and friends? Have you ever been acquainted with a mere man who would not be ashamed if you charged him with inflicting any one of them either openly or secretly upon his enemy? If you charged him with it and proved it, and he explained that he did it to make the beneficiary love him, would you let him continue to run at large? The pulpit says God's ways are not our ways. Thanks. Let us try to get along with our own the best we can; we can't improve on them by experimenting with His.
[begin page 400]All these horrors are emptied upon man, woman, and helpless child indiscriminately, to discipline them and make them good, and incline them to love their Maker. So the pulpit says. But the like are emptied upon the reptile, the bird, the quadruped and the insect, in the same lavish way. They torture each other, they mutilate each other, they rob each other, they kill each other, they eat each other, they live in the hourly fear of death all their days. Is the idea to train them to righteousness, and make them pious, and fit them for heaven?
If it isn't, then what is it for? Why is it done? There is certainly no sense in it, either in their case or man's. Even the cow, with all her intellectual prejudices, will think twice before she disputes that. Then what is it for? Why is it done? It seems to me that it proves one thing conclusively: if our Maker is all-powerful for good or evil, He is not in His right mind.
Beruth A. W. Kennedy.