Bruce Gerencser is publishing portions of Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth at his Web site just now; if you’ve never read it, you should head over there and take a look.
Like Bertrand Russell’s famous lecture Why I Am Not A Christian, or Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, it’s one of those things you cannot unread, something that you cannot forget.
Meantime, every person is playing on a harp — those millions and millions! — whereas not more than twenty in the thousand of them could play an instrument in the earth, or ever wanted to.
Consider the deafening hurricane of sound — millions and millions of voices screaming at once and millions and millions of harps gritting their teeth at the same time! I ask you: is it hideous, is it odious, is it horrible?
Consider further: it is a praise service; a service of compliment, of flattery, of adulation! Do you ask who it is that is willing to endure this strange compliment, this insane compliment; and who not only endures it, but likes it, enjoys it, requires if, commands it? Hold your breath!
It is God! This race’s god, I mean. He sits on his throne, attended by his four and twenty elders and some other dignitaries pertaining to his court, and looks out over his miles and miles of tempestuous worshipers, and smiles, and purrs, and nods his satisfaction northward, eastward, southward; as quaint and nave a spectacle as has yet been imagined in this universe, I take it.
Twain knew that the work would be unpopular, that it was wildly out-of-step with the culture that surrounded him. Accordingly, he stored it away and left it to his daughter to decide whether it would someday be published; she resisted till the 1960s. If you’ve never read it, you’re missing out.