The Letters Of Mark Twain, Complete


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We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the  
world--though I have reason to think I am the only one whose black-list  
runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.  
Yes, oh, yes, I am not overlooking the "steady progress from age to age  
of the coming of the kingdom of God and righteousness." "From age to  
age"--yes, it describes that giddy gait. I (and the rocks) will not live  
to see it arrive, but that is all right--it will arrive, it surely will.  
But you ought not to be always ironically apologizing for the Deity.  
If that thing is going to arrive, it is inferable that He wants it to  
arrive; and so it is not quite kind of you, and it hurts me, to see you  
flinging sarcasms at the gait of it. And yet it would not be fair in  
me not to admit that the sarcasms are deserved. When the Deity wants  
a thing, and after working at it for "ages and ages" can't show even a  
shade of progress toward its accomplishment, we--well, we don't laugh,  
but it is only because we dasn't. The source of "righteousness"--is in  
the heart? Yes. And engineered and directed by the brain? Yes. Well,  
history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it was  
in the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change. Its good and evil  
impulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in Old  
Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in  
Twentieth Century times. There has been no change.  
Meantime, the brain has undergone no change. It is what it always was.  
There are a few good brains and a multitude of poor ones. It was so in  
Old Bible times and in all other times--Greek, Roman, Middle Ages and  
1137  


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