Mark Twain: A Biography. Complete

by Albert Bigelow Paine

(See Chapter lxxiv)

There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869; a disturbance among the ministers, due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the Opera House. Mr. Beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the members. The situation presently changed. Mr. Beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the Opera House gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings, on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as Mark Twain. He was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon home. It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the Elmira Advertiser, over the signature of “S'cat.” It created a stir, of course.

The article follows:

MR. BEECHER AND THE CLERGY

“The Ministerial Union of Elmira, N. Y., at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of Rev. T. K. Beecher, declining to co-operate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera House, and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting. This has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from further responsibility as to his action.”—N. Y. Evangelist.

Poor Beecher! All this time he could do whatever he pleased that was wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the Ministerial Union of Elmira was responsible to God for it. He could lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it; he could promote discord in the church of Christ, and those parties had to make it right with the Deity as best they could; he could teach false doctrines to empty opera houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the Ministerial Union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes and stand responsible for it. He had such a comfortable thing of it! But he went too far. In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of Elmira. To say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to insipidity.

We cannot justly estimate this calamity, without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about. Mr. Beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the Independent Congregational Church, in this city. The meeting-house was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. Mr. Beecher regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship, and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. So, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house. Therefore he secured the Opera House and proceeded to preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons. He felt warranted in this course by a passage of Scripture which says, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature.” Opera-houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera-houses as a part of “all the world.” He looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of “every creature.” These ideas were as absurd as they were farfetched, but still they were the honest ebullitions of a diseased mind. His great mistake was in supposing that when he had the Saviour's indorsement of his conduct he had all that was necessary. He overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the Ministerial Union of Elmira. And there was. Wherefore, blind and foolish Mr. Beecher went to his destruction. The Ministerial Union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the gospel of Christ.

Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the Opera House meetings. They declined with great unanimity. In this they were wrong. Since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty they owed to their consciences and their God to contrive their discontinuance. They knew this. They felt it. Yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of.

The ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the Opera House continued; and not only continued, but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations churches where the Gospel was preached with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. It is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the Opera House at Mr. Beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled; and if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal I do not. Under the plea of charity for a sick brother he could have preached to that Opera House multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the Opera House experiment. And he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either. He could have relied on any he had in his barrel.

The Opera House meetings went on; other congregations were thin, and grew thinner, but the Opera House assemblages were vast. Every Sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the Opera House to be damned. The community talked, talked, talked. Everybody discussed the fact that the Ministerial Union disapproved of the Opera House meetings; also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there. And everybody wondered how the Ministerial Union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an Opera House meeting, and therefore didn't know what was taught there. Everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering.