Sam Clemens Considered Becoming a Preacher
By Rev. C. J. Armstrong, Pastor of the First Christian Church of Hannibal, MO
From The Twainian, Volume 4, no. 8 (May 1945)
IT MAY astonish many to learn that one of Mark Twain's early ambitions was to be a minister. In Albert Bigelow Paine’s “Biography of Mark Twain,” we read that Orion, his older brother, “thought of the ministry, an ambition which Sam shared with him for a time.” Then he quotes Mark Twain, “‘It was the most earnest ambition I ever had,’ Mark Twain once remarked thoughtfully. ‘Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.’”
From childhood until death, Mark Twain could never do anything in a half-hearted way. He was “earnest” in everything. In fact he was the most serious man in the world. As Howells puts it in a letter to Mark Twain, when “The Prince and the Pauper” appeared, “It is such a book as I would expect from you, knowing what a bottom of fury there is to your fun.” In Tom Sawyer we have a picture of the mental life of Sam Clemens. Tom Sawyer in fiction is the boy Sam Clemens, with a few traits and experiences taken from some playmates. Never did Mark Twain lose that deadly seriousness, that unfailing faithfulness to any subject or object that held his attention for a given time or for his life time. To any student of the life and writings of Mark Twain the earnestness of his boyhood ambition to be a preacher is understandable.
And yet it was not the ministry that gripped his soul. “Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher,” he adds. He certainly did not want to be a preacher like those to whom he had to listen in those days. There was only one thing that he despised more than going to church and Sunday school, and that was going to day school. Yet Mark Twain, as a boy, loved the limelight. Doubtless he tempered the tedium of “the pizen long sermons” with boyish dreams of the grandeur of standing in the pulpit to “speak his mind.” More than sixty years later (1902) in Hannibal he said in a high school commencement address “And often and often in those days I desired earnestly to stand in that Presbyterian pulpit and give instruction — but I was never asked until today. My ambition of two generations ago has been satisfied at last.”
But even that was not his real motive. Like many others who think of the ministry as a calling, he had an ulterior motive — an unorthodox motive. It was not the financial value of the ministry, for that was lower then than it is today. It was not the social standing of the minister, for he despised snobbery. It was to escape an eternal hell of literal fire and brimstone —“Because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.” He was looking at ultimate results. Somehow people, preachers among them, who proclaimed “a literal hell” convinced their hearers that they, the proclaimers, were exempt, while they, the hearers, were pretty sure of going there. So, when the boy Sam Clemens, twelve years old, heard the dogmatic assertion of the orthodox pulpiteers, he never doubted their truthfulness; he wanted assurance against such a fate, hence he thought of the ministry.
I have often wondered what would have been the result if Samuel Clemens had entered the ministry. He had many qualifications and some disabilities. He had a keen mind, a simple style, a sensitive conscience, a vast capacity for sympathy and compassion, an unfailing sincerity, and an unswerving courage. He was the most popular platform man of his day. His histrionic ability was of the highest order. He was wonderfully attractive in appearance and magnetic in every contact with his fellows. His disabilities were intellectual individualism, a hatred of humanity in the abstract (though he never hated any individual), and a gift of humor that prevented his being taken seriously. As Howells wrote, his “tragic seriousness broke in laughter which the unwise took for all of him.” It is true that he was picturesque in his profanity, that he was not a teetotaler (though never a heavy drinker), and that he was sometimes violent in outbursts of wrath. But we would expect all these to be eliminated if he had entered the ministry. We may be sure that his preaching would not have been orthodox, conventional, or stale.
But, perhaps, he fulfilled a greater ministry as it was. Could any church have endured a combination of Dr. Orchard and Dean Inge — the courage of the one and the piercing gloominess of the other — in its pulpit? He was a hater of shams and hypocrisy. He was a scourge to lash man out of conventional selfrighteousness into kindlier relations. He held up a mirror by which men and nations could see themselves in all the ugliness of their sordid motives and in all the glory of their potentiality for simple goodness and brotherliness. It will be a happy day for us all when we take Mark Twain out of our mere fun makers and place him among the prophets of a better day. “Against the assaults of laughter nothing can stand,” as he himself said in “The Mysterious Stranger.”
The motive that led Sam Clemens to think of entering the ministry is just as worthy as that which has prompted many actually to enter it. It looks like a safe job to many who undertake it. However, one’s later motives for continuing may rise to higher levels. We may come to see that the ministry is life’s greatest adventure. To preach a gospel of love and justice as the remedy for the world’s ills is the acme of tested optimism, It is not the mission for one who is looking for a safe job. Mark Twain did not enter the ministry, but preachers can all get great help from him. He will develop in us a sense of humor, a vast compassion, a hatred of shams, hypocrisies, and a fearless fidelity to truth as we see it.