| Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter
part of the seventeenth century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary.
He converted sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them that
a dog-tooth necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough clothing to
come to divine service in. His poor flock loved him very, very dearly; and
when his funeral was over, they got up in a body (and came out of the restaurant)
with tears in their eyes, and saying, one to another, that he was a good
tender missionary, and they wished they had some more of him. - A Burlesque Autobiography |
 |
We are all missionaries (propagandists of our views.) Each of us disapproves
of the other missionaries.
- Notebook, 1905
O kind missionary, O compassionate missionary, leave China! Come home and convert
these Christians.
- "The United States of Lyncherdom"
...missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you
had to do was to cure the head savage's sick daughter by a miracle -- a miracle
like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance -- and immediately that
head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new convert's enthusiasm.
You could sit down and make yourself easy now. He would take the ax and convert
the rest of the nation himself.
- "Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty"
I would not now try to unsettle any person's religious faith, where it was
untroubled by doubt -- not even the savage African's. I have found it pretty
hard to give up missionarying -- that least excusable of all human trades --
but I was obliged to do it, because I could not continue to exercise it without
private shame while publicly and privately deriding and blaspheming the other
missionaries.
- Autobiograpical dictation, 6 September 1907. Published in Autobiography
of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (University of California Press, 2015)
I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have
not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping
away our children's faith & winning them to the worshop of alien gods. We
have lacked the opporutnity to find out how a parent feels to see his child
deriding & blaspheming the religion of its ancestors. We have lacked the
opportunity of hearing a foreign missionary who has been forced upon us against
our will lauding his own saints & gods & saying harsh things about ours.
If some time or other, we shall have these experiences, it will probably go
hard with the missionary ... The missionary has no wish to be an insulter, but
how is he to help it? All his propositions are insults, word them as he may
...
- unpublished editorial sent to Charles Frederic Moberly Bell of the London
Times, July 1900. Published in "The Missionary in World-Politics"
in Who
Is Mark Twain? (HarperStudio 2009).
Joe, where is the fairness in the missionary's trade? His prey is the children;
he cannot convert adults. He beguiles the litle children to forsake their parents'
religion & break their hearts. ... To my mind the Christian missionary is
easily the most criminal criminal that exists on the planet, & the lowest
down in the scale of malefactors.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 19 April 1909
_____
WHO
IS MARK TWAIN?
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contains the full text of "The Missionary in World-Politics"
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