It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie:
DEAR SIR & FRIEND,—You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I know it.
N. B.—If there should be other applications, this one not to count.
Yours, MARK.
P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the selection myself.
Carnegie answered:
Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for
you. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall
have it.
There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I
like better than anything I've read for many a day.
I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred
message in proper form, & if the author don't object may I send that
sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to
which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible
for.
Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little
missals will go forth. This inimitable satire is to become a
classic. I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the
author.
Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain's criticism of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader: Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association, wrote: “I hail you as the Voltaire of America. It is a noble distinction. God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in this noblest, sublimest of crusades.”
Ministers were by no means all against him. The associate pastor of the Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: “I want to thank you for your matchless article in the current North American. It must make converts of well-nigh all who read it.”
But a Boston school-teacher was angry. “I have been reading the North American,” she wrote, “and I am filled with shame and remorse that I have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers.”