Clemens attended a Yale alumni dinner that winter and incidentally visited Twichell in Hartford.  The old question of moral responsibility came up and Twichell lent his visitor a copy of Jonathan Edwards’s ‘Freedom of the Will’ for train perusal.  Clemens found it absorbing.  Later he wrote Twichell his views.

Dear Joe,—­(After compliments.)—­[Meaning “What a good time you gave me; what a happiness it was to be under your roof again,” etc.  See opening sentence of all translations of letters passing between Lord Roberts and Indian princes and rulers.]—­From Bridgeport to New York, thence to home, & continuously until near midnight I wallowed & reeked with Jonathan in his insane debauch; rose immensely refreshed & fine at ten this morning, but with a strange & haunting sense of having been on a three days’ tear with a drunken lunatic.  It is years since I have known these sensations.  All through the book is the glare of a resplendent intellect gone mad—­a marvelous spectacle.  No, not all through the book—­the drunk does not come on till the last third, where what I take to be Calvinism & its God begins to show up & shine red & hideous in the glow from the fires of hell, their only right and proper adornment.

    Jonathan seems to hold (as against the Armenian position) that the
    man (or his soul or his will) never creates an impulse itself, but
    is moved to action by an impulse back of it.  That’s sound!

    Also, that of two or more things offered it, it infallibly chooses
    the one which for the moment is most pleasing to itself.  Perfectly
    correct!  An immense admission for a man not otherwise sane.

Up to that point he could have written Chapters III & IV of my suppressed Gospel.  But there we seem to separate.  He seems to concede the indisputable & unshaken dominion of Motive & Necessity (call them what he may, these are exterior forces & not under the man’s authority, guidance, or even suggestion); then he suddenly flies the logical track & (to all seeming) makes the man & not those exterior forces responsible to God for the man’s thoughts, words, & acts.  It is frank insanity.

I think that when he concedes the autocratic dominion of Motive and Necessity he grants a third position of mine—­that a man’s mind is a mere machine—­an automatic machine—­which is handled entirely from the outside, the man himself furnishing it absolutely nothing; not an ounce of its fuel, & not so much as a bare suggestion to that exterior engineer as to what the machine shall do nor how it shall do it nor when.

    After that concession it was time for him to get alarmed & shirk
    —­for he was pointed straight for the only rational & possible next
    station on that piece of road—­the irresponsibility of man to God.

    And so he shirked.  Shirked, and arrived at this handsome result: