So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel:  “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor’s religion is.”  Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it.  Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.

In the place where Saint-Simon describes the death of Monseigneur, son of the king, and the court hypocrites are wailing their extravagantly pretended sorrow, Clemens wrote: 

It is all so true, all so human.  God made these animals.  He must have noticed this scene; I wish I knew how it struck Him.

There were not many notes in the Suetonius, nor in the Carlyle Revolution, though these were among the volumes he read oftenest.  Perhaps they expressed for him too completely and too richly their subject-matter to require anything at his hand.  Here and there are marked passages and occasional cross-references to related history and circumstance.

There was not much room for comment on the narrow margins of the old copy of Pepys, which he had read steadily since the early seventies; but here and there a few crisp words, and the underscoring and marked passages are plentiful enough to convey his devotion to that quaint record which, perhaps next to Suetonius, was the book he read and quoted most.

Francis Parkman’s Canadian Histories he had read periodically, especially the story of the Old Regime and of the Jesuits in North America.  As late as January, 1908, he wrote on the title-page of the Old Regime: 

Very interesting.  It tells how people religiously and otherwise insane came over from France and colonized Canada.

He was not always complimentary to those who undertook to Christianize the Indians; but he did not fail to write his admiration of their courage—­their very willingness to endure privation and even the fiendish savage tortures for the sake of their faith.  “What manner of men are these?” he wrote, apropos of the account of Bressani, who had undergone the most devilish inflictions which savage ingenuity could devise, and yet returned maimed and disfigured the following spring to “dare again the knives and fiery brand of the Iroquois.”  Clemens was likely to be on the side of the Indians, but hardly in their barbarism.  In one place he wrote: 

That men should be willing to leave their happy homes and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach these Indians the road to hell would be rational, understandable, but why they should want to teach them a way to heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot grasp.

Other histories, mainly English and French, showed how he had read them —­read and digested every word and line.  There were two volumes of Lecky, much worn; Andrew D. White’s ’Science and Theology’—­a chief interest for at least one summer—­and among the collection a well-worn copy of ‘Modern English Literature—­Its Blemishes and Defects’, by Henry H. Breen.  On the title-page of this book Clemens had written: