Letters from Earth

Thanks to La Belle Soeur Jean, I am now able to read my favorite author, Mark Twain, on line. I've read everything in print, but now I can read it again, and not only that, I can copy and paste it to my heart's content.

The website, ClassicReader.com, has several of Twain's works along with many other classics.

I'm starting here with Letters from Earth, and, by and by, we'll work out just what the problem is.

The letters are from Archangel Lucifer to his compatriots Gabriel and Michael. The prologue begins, however, with a period before he comes to Earth when the Creator has a grand idea to create the universe containing Earth. Lucifer ("the Light"), or Satan, has a discussion with his compatriots about the creation. I won't bother to go deeply into the name problem except to say that Lucifer has come down to us in the Chrisitian religion as an evil character, and we use the names interchangeably. The possibilities for the differences include, among other reasons, character mix-up, biblical mistranslations (intentional and otherwise), or the existence of two different characters who have gotten fused down through the ages, much the same way as Jehovah/Yahweh/the Lord. That's for another discussion, however, and it is obvious in Letters from Earth that Twain is using the name Satan to indicate the Archangel Lucifer.

Satan speaks:

"You perceive that it is a stupendous idea. Nothing approaching it has been evolved from the Master Intellect before. Law -- Automatic Law -- exact and unvarying Law -- requiring no watching, no correcting, no readjusting while the eternities endure! He said those countless vast bodies would plunge through the wastes of Space ages and ages, at unimaginable speed, around stupendous orbits, yet never collide, and never lengthen nor shorten their orbital periods by so much as the hundredth part of a second in two thousand years! That is the new miracle, and the greatest of all -- Automatic Law! And He gave it a name -- the LAW OF NATURE -- and said Natural Law is the LAW OF GOD -- interchangeable names for one and the same thing."

You can see where that must lead, I'm sure.

At any rate, after some time, we find...

...Satan had been making admiring remarks about certain of the Creator's sparkling industries -- remarks which, being read between the lines, were sarcasms. He had made them confidentially to his safe friends the other Archangels, but they had been overheard by some ordinary angels and reported at Headquarters.

He was ordered into banishment for a day -- the celestial day. It was a punishment he was used to, on account of his too flexible tongue. Formerly he had been deported into Space, there being nowhither else to send him, and had flapped tediously around there in the eternal night and the Arctic chill; but now it occurred to him to push on and hunt up the earth and see how the Human-Race experiment was coming along.

By and by he wrote home -- very privately -- to St. Michael and St. Gabriel about it.

Now, I believe there will be plenty of opportunity to blog in a comment or two from Satan's visit to Earth that will parallel nicely many current events comments. In fact, today, from Satan's first letter, the stage is revealed:

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him; he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.

There.

How was that little sidetrip from politics? Of course, in history, we realize that religion was politics, and these days religion and politics are again more or less inseparable in our country as they have been all along in many other countries.

We thought we had it separated, but we were mistaken.