The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11: AntepenultimataBierce, Ambrose
General
The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 11: Antepenultimata
Bierce, Ambrose
American essays; American literature
That the goddery will be a point of chief attraction goes without
saying. A temple in which, satisfying the two mightiest needs of his
spiritual nature, one may both scoff and pray will have a powerful
fascination for the truly religious. There the visiting stranger from
the overseas can perform appropriate rites before the deity of his
fathers and execute feats of contumelious disdain—short of actual
demolition—before the hideous and senseless images adored of those not
delivered from error’s chain. Even to the wicked person who has justly
incurred the ancient reproach that he “tears down but does not build
up,” the god-show will have a certain value as displaying everywhere
the kind of things he tears down and nowhere the kind he is expected
to build up—whereby he shall be put into better esteem and kicked and
cuffed with abated assiduity. There is one disquieting possibility—one
haunting thought that grows amain to apprehension: What will be the
effect of setting up a multitude of gods in a city which has not
hitherto tolerated one? It was well, though, to make the experiment,
even as a missionary measure; and if the lakeside pantheon had served
to lure the world’s pious to their financial doom the Chicagonese might
have become a profoundly religious people, attentive to pilgrims and
blandly assuring them that it was no trouble to show gods.
1892.
FOR LAST WORDS
The special kind of telephone designed to be affixed to the bedside
of one who may have the bad luck to suffer from some infectious or
contagious disease is a thoughtful provision for a crying need. By
means of the instrument so placed, the patient’s friends are able to
converse to him, read and sing at him, and, in general, give him the
benefit of their society without danger of getting back more than
they bestow. The plan is of admirable simplicity and nothing could
be better—for the friends. There must be a certain satisfaction in
possessing one end of a telephone at the other end of which there is
one who cannot get away—one who has to listen to as many helloes as may
be thought good for him, and to submit to the question, “Is that you?”
when you know that it is he, as frequently as you choose to afflict
him with it. That he is heartily wishing but impotently unable to
transmit his disorder through the wire adds something to the joy of the
situation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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