![]() adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles. The shooting down of poor Smarr in the Main Street at noonday supplied me with dreams and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture-the great family Bible spread open upon the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot. This religious preoccupation and subsequent struggle is brilliantly if unwittingly posed in that earliest boyhood image of the ponderous word of God suffocating an already dying man. As his closest minister-friend, Joseph Twitchell, once said, Sam Clemens was too orthodox on the doctrine of total human depravity. A compulsive guilt seeker, he blamed himself for at least the deaths of a brother, a son, and a daughter, and he finally despised the human race because it included men like himself. ![]() Fear, punishment, conscience, duty, the hand of God, death-these were the staples in his moral pantry. He named his house cats, rather apocalyptically, Famine, Pestilence, Satan, and Sin he thought the height of confidence was a Christian with four aces smugness was a friend waiting for a vacancy in the trinity and so on ad infinitum-or, for him, ad nauseum. But he did have a soul gripped by the Puritan fathers, a grip which relentlessly affected his moods and his metaphors. ![]() Unlike his friend William Dean Howells, who worried a great deal about the difference between a Unitarian and a Universal, Twain did not have a mind turned to fine theological distinctions. Twain frequently called his religious life “Presbyterianism,” the faith of his mother’s family, but that label became for him a kind of shoebox repository into which he shoved everything from the faith John Knox espoused to the most nebulous sort of Christian belief. It is of that early period, completed before he was 50 years old, that I wish to speak. Nevertheless, the early years-the western years as it were-are crucial to any real understanding of Twain’s attitude toward religion, revealing moments of a remarkable religious experience and providing the backdrop against which those last decades, so full of financial strife and personal tragedy, must be seen. The Pittsburgh Daily Commercial, 10 Jun.When discussing Mark Twain’s religious attitudes, his biographers have characteristically focused on the last decades of his life, those final, frustrating years in which Twain said going to church gave him dysentery. ![]() Those Democrats who oppose a platform like this are euphoniously characterized as "pulling, long-eared, cowardly, double-distilled quintessence of hog-wash idiots." Thomas Bilson, The true difference betweene Christian subiection and unchristian rebellion, 1585 How can we but kindle when we see you fray the people of God from the sweete & wholesom foode of their soules, and delude them with your huskes and hogwash? While hogwash may be found used in figurative fashion between the 16th and 18th centuries, it is generally held that the word took on its modern significance of "nonsense" in the 19th century. The original meaning of hogwash was "swill" (aka "a semiliquid food for animals (such as swine) composed of edible refuse mixed with water or skimmed or sour milk"). Hogwash has the charming ring of a rustic 19th-century American colloquialism (such as sockdologer), but in fact has been in English use since the 15th century. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. Hogwash ("nonsense, balderdash") spiked dramatically in lookups on August 16th, 2018, after former CIA Director John Brennan used the word in an editorial in The New York Times, dismissively applied to arguments put forth by President Trump.
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