If the tragedies of life shook his faith in the goodness and justice and the mercy of God as manifested toward himself, he at any rate never questioned that the wider scheme of the universe was attuned to the immutable law which contemplates nothing less than absolute harmony. I never knew him to refer to this particular document; but he never destroyed it and never amended it, nor is it likely that he would have done either had it been presented to him for consideration even during the last year of his life.
He was never intentionally dogmatic. In a memorandum on a fly-leaf of
Moncure D. Conway's Sacred Anthology he wrote:
RELIGION
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. MARK TWAIN, 19th Cent. A.D.
And in another note:
I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion maybe. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life hence it is a valuable possession to him.
Mark Twain's religion was a faith too wide for doctrines—a benevolence too limitless for creeds. From the beginning he strove against oppression, sham, and evil in every form. He despised meanness; he resented with every drop of blood in him anything that savored of persecution or a curtailment of human liberties. It was a religion identified with his daily life and his work. He lived as he wrote, and he wrote as he believed. His favorite weapon was humor—good-humor—with logic behind it. A sort of glorified truth it was truth wearing a smile of gentleness, hence all the more quickly heeded.
"He will be remembered with the great humorists of all time," says Howells, "with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy of his company; none of them was his equal in humanity."
Mark Twain understood the needs of men because he was himself supremely human. In one of his dictations he said:
I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small or a large way. When it is small, as compared with the same ingredient in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination.