Once a woman said to him: 

“Mr. Clemens, you are not a pessimist, you only think you are.”  And she might have added, with equal force and truth: 

“You are not a disbeliever in immortality; you only think you are.”

Nothing could have conveyed more truly his attitude toward life and death.  His belief in God, the Creator, was absolute; but it was a God far removed from the Creator of his early teaching.  Every man builds his God according to his own capacities.  Mark Twain’s God was of colossal proportions—­so vast, indeed, that the constellated stars were but molecules in His veins—­a God as big as space itself.

Mark Twain had many moods, and he did not always approve of his own God; but when he altered his conception, it was likely to be in the direction of enlargement—­a further removal from the human conception, and the problem of what we call our lives.

In 1906 he wrote:—­[See also 1870, chap. lxxviii; 1899, chap. ccv; and
various talks, 1906-07, etc.]
    Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God,
    the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real
    universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only comets unto
    which incredible distant Neptune is merely an out post, a Sandy Hook
    to homeward-bound specters of the deeps of space that have not
    glimpsed it before for generations—­a universe not made with hands
    and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the
    illimitable reaches of space by the flat of the real God just
    mentioned, by comparison with whom the gods whose myriads infest the
    feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and
    lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.

At an earlier period-the date is not exactly fixable, but the stationery used and the handwriting suggest the early eighties—­he set down a few concisely written pages of conclusions—­conclusions from which he did not deviate materially in after years.  The document follows: 

    I believe in God the Almighty.

    I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or
    delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to
    mortal eyes at any time in any place.

    I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written
    by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less
    inspired by Him.

I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works:  I perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come, if there should be one.

I do not believe in special providences.  I believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws:  If one man’s family is swept away by a pestilence and another man’s