Chapter three of The Chronicle of Young Satan is where Twain’s argument starts to land. Father Peter is in jail — Father Adolf has remembered losing exactly the right number of ducats at exactly the right time — and the whole town has rediscovered how little they ever liked Father Peter and Margaret anyway. Into this walks Young Satan, who spends the chapter debating theology with a housekeeper, explaining the French-speaking conditions in hell, healing a dog’s eye, and delivering the most coldly convincing case against the moral sense that Twain ever wrote.
The moral sense, Father Peter says, is God’s greatest gift: the ability to tell right from wrong. Young Satan takes Theodore to a factory in France where workers do fifteen-hour days in filth and poverty while the very holy proprietors profit, and explains: only beings with the moral sense can choose wrong on purpose. Animals kill, but they don’t build systems. They don’t torture for fun. They don’t drive a dog’s eye from its socket and then fall off a cliff and lie there while the dog spends two days trying to get someone to come help the man who beat him. That last part actually happens. Satan heals the eye, talks to the dog in dog, and sends the boys to find Hans Oppert dying at the bottom of a cliff. The priest refuses last rites. Seppi takes the dog home and wonders if God will forgive Hans since the dog already did.
We also dig into why fairy money turns to dirt but Satan’s gold stays gold, why Paine-Duneka’s astrologer is a less interesting villain than Father Adolf in every way, and what the Malleus Maleficarum has to do with Santa Claus coming down the chimney.
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