reatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He
took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time
as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose
that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old
friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach
his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church,
and he groaned out: "Oh yes, I go. It 'most kills me, but I go," and I
did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife
wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
finally come to her saying, "Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
lost with you." He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice
and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had
both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial
of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
lies, which for love's sake he held above even the truth, and he went to
her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he
was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her
keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the
doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart,
and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him
declare it merely functional.

To make an end of these records as to Clemens's beliefs, so far as I knew
them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would
have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can
hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause,
a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But
the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest,
and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.
All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope
of liv