“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!... “You perceive, _now_, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier. “It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a _thought_--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!” He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true. THE END BOOKS BY MARK TWAIN Cloth THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR THE GILDED AGE THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN THE INNOCENTS ABROAD JOAN OF ARC LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI MARK TWAIN’S SPEECHES THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLEYBURG THE PRINCE AND PAUPER PUDD’NHEAD WILSON ROUGHING IT SKETCHES NEW AND OLD THE $30,000 BEQUEST TOM SAWYER ABROAD THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER A TRAMP ABROAD Thin-Paper Limp-Leather