November 3 Wednesday — In Redding, Conn. Sam sent an order form to Harper & Brothers for their story, “Beasley’s Xmas Party” to be send to various of his friends (blank lines left for Sam to write in names) [MTP: Harper’s Weekly Magazine, 18 Dec. 1909]. Note: “Beasley’s Christmas Party,” by Booth Tarkington (1909); see Gribben 686.
Paine writes of the day’s activities:
November 3. He said he could not sleep last night, for thinking what a fool he had been in his variousinvestments,
“I have always been the victim of somebody,” he said, “and always an idiot myself, doing things that even a child would not do. Never asking anybody’s advice—never taking it when it was offered. I can’t see how anybody could do the things I have done and have kept right on doing.” I could see that the thought agitated him, and I suggested that we go to his room and read, which we did, and had a riotous time over the most recent chapters of the ‘Letters from the Earth’, and some notes he had made for future chapters on infant damnation and other distinctive features of orthodox creeds. He told an anecdote of an old minister who declared that Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn’t be identified because it had lost its tag.
Somewhat on the defensive I said, “But we must admit that the so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive.”
He answered, “Yes, but in spite of their religion, Not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before the Christian religion was born.
“I have been reading Gibbon’s celebrated Fifteenth Chapter,” he said later, “and I don’t see what Christians found against it. It is so mild—so gentle in its sarcasm.” He added that he had been reading also a little book of brief biographies and had found in it the saying of Darwin’s father, “Unitarianism is a featherbed to catch falling Christians.”
“I was glad to find and identify that saying,” he said; “it is so good.”
He finished the evening by reading a chapter from Carlyle’s French Revolution—a fine pyrotechnic passage—the gathering at Versailles. I said that Carlyle somehow reminded me of a fervid stump-speaker who pounded his fists and went at his audience fiercely, determined to convince them.
“Yes,” he said, “but he is the best one that ever lived” [MTB 1534-35].
C.G. Child for the Victor Talking-Machine Co. wrote to Paine (though catalogued to Clemens). He gave details of the contract he might make with Twain for him to record some of his short stories [MTP].
Lillian I. Stivers wrote to Sam. She was a high school girl in Niles, Calif. and the “daughter of Lillian McCarthy-Stivers, the eldest daughter of the late D.E. McCarthy whom you knew in Virginia City, Nev..... It has been my mother’s as well as my own great desire to receive a letter from you...mama told of your former friendship with grandpa; I then looked through some old papers and found a letter from you to grandpa. This letter however did not satisfy me as I wanted one of my own” [MTP]. Note: Denis McCarthy’s daughter.