HE best thing Mark Twain ever said was, "I should like to see the ballot in the hands of every woman." Freethinkers should also remember him with gratitude; he said enough from our point of view to warrant that. "Give me my glasses," were his last words. It will be but a short time before some pious evangelical hypocrite will add, "I want to read my Bible!" They are already writing about his "highest sphere of thought," namely, his religious thought.
I remember when a Presbyterian deacon said of him, "I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow." The church people are all anxious to avoid their own history concerning Mark Twain and many other people.
The Reverend Doctor Twitchell said at Mark's funeral that a simple soul had gone trustingly to the beyond. He didn't mention where the beyond was, and he prayed to the Christian God that courage in the faith of immortality be given to those who mourn.
Through all these Christian notices runs an undercurrent that Mark Twain was only secondarily a humorist. I knew him somewhat in the old days and have heard him lecture. He certainly laughed superstition from the minds of thousands, and the most of his books bear witness to his broad and liberal views.
The Reverend Doctor Van Dyke mixed much religious sophistry with his remarks at the funeral of Twain, but the reverend doctor is a theological acrobat.
He preached once on the Atonement, and said there are a thousand true doctrines of the Atonement, which is saying substantially that no doctrine specifically is true—for instance, the doctrine of the Westminster Confession, to which Van Dyke pledged loyalty when he was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He at that time ripped up the Westminster settlement, and reopened the whole question for discussion.
Any preacher who believes in the geology of Moses, the astronomy of Joshua, and the mathematics of the Trinity, must do an immense amount of "side-stepping."
Christianity is only a bubble of superstition, and Jesus is reduced to a toy god of the Sunday School.