MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--Do not delay your departure. You can come back and lecture another time. In the language of the worldly--you can "cut and come again." Your friends, THE CLERGY.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 3oth.
MR. MARK TWAIN--DEAR SIR,--You had better go. Yours, THE CHIEF OF POLICE.
(REPLY)
SAN FRANCISCO, June 30th.
GENTLEMEN,--Restrain your emotions; you observe that they cannot avail. Read:
NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY Bush Street
Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868 One Night Only
FAREWELL LECTURE of MARK TWAIN Subject: The Oldest of the Republics VENICE PAST AND PRESENT
Box-Office open Wednesday and Thursday No extra charge for reserved seats
ADMISSION . . . . . . . . . . . ONE DOLLAR Doors open at 7 Orgies to commence at 8 P. M.
The public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting eclat to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the 4th. The lecture will be delivered certainly on the 2d, and the event will be celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the 4th, a procession of citizens, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from Russian Hill in the evening, which I have ordered at my sole expense, the cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars.
AT NEW MERCANTILE LIBRARY Bush Street Thursday Evening, July 2, 1868
APPENDIX I
MARK TWAIN'S CHAMPIONSHIP OF THOMAS K. BEECHER
(See Chapter lxxiv)
There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869; a disturbance among the ministers, due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the Opera House. Mr. Beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergymen, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the members. The situation presently changed. Mr. Beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the Opera House gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings, on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as Mark Twain. He was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon home. It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the Elmira Advertiser, over the signature of "S'cat." It created a stir, of course.
The article follows:
MR. BEECHER AND THE CLERGY
"The Ministerial Union of Elmira, N. Y., at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of Rev. T. K. Beecher, declining to co-operate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera House, and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting.