Personally, Barnum’s religion was an acute form of Universalism. He wrote a pamphlet which was published by the Universalist Church called “Why I am a Universalist,” in which he revealed his whole religious philosophy and much of his character. In this pamphlet, which was written one year before Barnum’s death, but which is discussed here because it is appropriate, he showed clearly that it was impossible for him to conceive that every one will not eventually seek and find salvation. He said that he could not believe that in order to complete their paradise the angels need a sight of the evil ones roasting in hell. He craved a salvation where The Woolly Horse, The Fejee Mermaid, and Joice Heth would not be thrown up to him as the sins of his days upon earth. In “Why I am a Universalist” Barnum wrote; “All Christians pray for the salvation of sinners, and yet profess to believe it will never be. The first essential of prayer is that it be in faith. The Universalist Church is the only one that believes in success.” And it must have been unbearable to the pious and practical mind of Barnum even to entertain the idea of eternal failure in the matter of the end of all. Such a faith in the “ultimate holiness and happiness of all mankind” was natural, almost inevitable, to Barnum’s character. Success on earth depended for him upon natural resource of ambition and energy, a dash of luck, stirred up in a whirlpool of notoriety. But it all depended upon ourselves. In eternity the rules were different. There was an absolute monarch, and the only comfort to a man who, like Barnum, was used to a thorough dependence upon his own head and hands, was the faith that this Great Dictator was a benevolent despot, and that paradise was a museum, in which all the varieties of human curiosities lived in harmony with no embarrassing attempt to delineate good from bad, and in which there was no wilful segregation of types on the part of the Creator, who in His everlasting mercy made them all in His own image.