Mark Twain's profanity

[victor steinbok]

Utterly unrelated to the original question, but does have something to
do with Mary Baker Eddy and "profanity". Taking exception to
/McClure/'s profile of her family, she wrote, in reply:

"Although McClure's Magazine attributes to my father language
unseemly, his household law, constantly enforced, was no profanity and
no slang phrases."

[p. 308 of MBE's The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (1913)]

MBE's defense against McClure's savagery of her family is /nothing/
next to the reverence offered for MBE by her followers. In this sense,
anything critical offered by Mark Twain of MBE may well have been
considered "profanity" by the followers. Conversely, the fact that
MBE's writings were elevated to the Biblical level within the Church
was profane to mainline Protestants and Catholics. So there is plenty
of "profanity" to go around.

Here's sample (favorable) criticism from "Biblical Review":

> This same section prescribes the limitation of literature for use in these words:
> > The Bible, together with Science and Health and other works by Mrs. Eddy, shall be his only textbooks for self-instruction in Christian Science, and for teaching and practising metaphysical healing [p. 84].
> Mark Twain in commenting upon this paragraph says that it reads just as though Mrs. Eddy were the author of the Bible as well as Science and Health. To him this was a most ridiculous and absurd idea, but in reality there is nothing accidental or ungrammatical about that sentence. For the Bible which Christian Scientists read, interpreted by Science and Health with the Key to the Scriptures, is a Bible written entirely by Mary Baker Eddy, and has little relation to the Bible of the historic church. It is this Bible interpreted by Science and Health that she has honered by making it joint pastor of every Christian Science Church.

Catholics were particularly incensed with near-deification of both MBE
and her writings, so seeing profanities in exchanges (real or
imagined) between Mark Twain and MBE is as easy as seeing penises at a
sausage factory.

VS-)

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