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Letters From The Earth, Letter 11: The End Is By And By! (Finale)

Letter Eleven is the last one Twain wrote, and it doesn’t end so much as stop. Satan grants that human history in all ages is red with blood and bitter with hate — but that it has always had some kind of limit. Even the church, credited with spilling more innocent blood than all the political wars put together, observed a limit. A sort of limit. But when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth goes to war there is no limit. He is totally without mercy, he who is called the fountain of mercy.

We spend real time on the thirty-two thousand Midianite virgins — examined, then sold into the worst and shamefulest of slaveries by the same Father who had slaughtered their families in front of them, while they prayed to him for rescue. Twain’s point is that every desperate prayer is addressed to the one doing the thing. Satan then asks what use God had for virgins, notes his priests got a share, and brings in Père Hyacinthe’s testimony about the confessional.

Then comes Minnesota, 1862 — and a warning, because it’s brutal. Twelve Indians, deeply wronged and treacherously treated by the US government, crucify a farm family. Twain describes it and then stops himself: there are indignities so atrocious that the pen cannot write them. Even Satan won’t finish the sentence. The Minnesota campaign, he says, was merely a duplicate of the Midianite raid — except the Indian was more merciful than the Father of Mercies.

And then Satan asks whether you’d expect this moral bankrupt to become a teacher of gentleness and purity. It looks impossible. But listen to him. And he quotes the Beatitudes in full, with no commentary, before the last line Twain ever wrote in this book: they ought always to be read from the pulpit alongside Numbers and Deuteronomy, so the congregation gets an all-around view of our Father in Heaven. Yet not in a single instance has he ever known a clergyman to do it.

This is the last episode of our Twain season, and the last for a little while. Come find us finishing Every Minute of Everything Everywhere All at Once — we’ll announce the next devil there.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”