Twain's Hope for Heaven

After nearly 39 years, Mark Twain returns to Hannibal. Meets an old man and introduces himself as "Smith". Out of curiosity, he asks about his childhood friends. The old man goes on describing how so and so fool failed, died, and lost. Only one seemed to had seen some success. Finally he asked about himself with his real name. The old man goes "Oh, he succeeded well enough - another case of a damned fool. If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner". Twain learned the lesson of humility; he is still considered "a damned fool" by his village folks.

After this, the name Mark Twain became a very heavy burden for Sam Clemens to match up to. Failures after failures came upon him. Sorrow upon sorrow became his lot. Even his faith in God was shaken. Though he could not deny God's existence, he blamed God for all the misery in the world; all imperfections were God's mistakes. A jolly happy man began to resent the very idea of him being called a "humorist".

Success did come back to him even before he died but the kind of man he would go on becoming was beyond his imagination. As he lay on his sick bed, waiting for the departure, he began to reflect about the afterlife.

In his last work "Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine (1995), there is one advice he gave to Albert Paine that sums up his hope for the afterlife. When time will come for Paine to go to heaven, he says "Leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and the dog would go in.”

Call him a deist, an agnostic or whatever; he banked his soul in God's favor. Only heaven will tell if he was allowed in or not. But Jesus Christ gives us the assurance that should we not be so worried about our entrance in heaven; we must accept him as our Lord and Savior because he is "The way and the truth and the life".