When Kipling
protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer
was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is
Man?': "Oh, he is real. He's all the boy that I have known or
recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because,
when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education
avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man.
Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and
gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He
would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an
angel." It was what he called Kismet.
It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or
theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced,
the human race remained "indestructibly content, happy, thankful,
proud.
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