You Can't Pray a Lie

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: Huck Finn's war with his conscience — all right, then, I'll go to hell.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, in the little town of Florida, and grew up beside the Mississippi River in the years when Missouri was a slave state. The world knows him as Mark Twain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Tom Sawyer's Comrade, says the title page — is his masterpiece, and by many reckonings the great American novel. On the book's first page he set the scene in the Mississippi Valley, and the time — in his own words — "forty to fifty years ago": a man looking back across the war, forty to fifty years into his own past, at the slave country of his boyhood, writing it in its own voices; he prefaced the book with a note explaining, painstakingly, the several dialects he had reproduced from personal familiarity. And he posted a warning at the front door: persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By order of the author. Hold that notice in mind, because the man who forbade us to find a moral wrote what may be the greatest scene of moral crisis in American fiction, and tonight we are going to find it anyway.

The story so far. Huck Finn, a motherless boy fleeing a drunken father, and Jim, a slave fleeing the sale that would part him from his wife and children, have come down the Mississippi together on a raft. Jim has fed him, kept his watches, shielded him, and called him honey. But two con men who attached themselves to the raft have just sold Jim for forty dollars to a farmer named Phelps, and Huck sits down alone in the wigwam of the raft to decide what to do — with everything his world ever taught him saying that the sin is helping Jim, and the way back to God is turning him in.

One note before the reading. Twain wrote this scene in the language of that world, and he put in Huck's mouth the slur that world used for a black man. Tonight, in seven places, where the text uses that word, the reading says slave. Nothing else is altered.

From Mark Twain:

I went to the raft, and set down in the wigwam to think. But I couldn't come to nothing. I thought till I wore my head sore, but I couldn't see no way out of the trouble. After all this long journey, and after all we'd done for them scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty dollars.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd got to be a slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she'd be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she'd sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful slave, and they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and disgraced.

He goes on:

And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a slave to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I'd be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace. That was my fix exactly.

The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's slave that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, "There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been acting about that slave goes to everlasting fire."

He goes on:

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that slave's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie—I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway slave Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

He goes on:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.

I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

So ends the passage. Now let us turn it over, because there is more theology in that wigwam than in many a systematics volume.

Understand first what Twain has actually shown us, because the scene only works if you take Huck at his word. This is not a boy shrugging off religion. This is the sincerest repentance in American literature — the kneeling, the self-examination, the horror of hypocrisy, the refusal to fake a prayer he knows is hollow. Every muscle of a healthy conscience is working. Conviction of sin: present. Fear of God: present. Honesty about his own double-dealing: present to a degree most adults never reach. The machinery is perfect. And the machinery is pointed at exactly the wrong target. Huck's conscience grinds him — that is his own word, grinding — not for a sin, but for the finest thing he has ever done or ever will do.

Scripture says the machinery is real. From the letter to the Romans:

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.

Conscience is God's gift, a witness planted in every one of us, accusing or else excusing. The Puritan Stephen Charnock says every man's conscience testifies that he is unlike what he ought to be, according to that law engraven upon his heart. And the ancient historian Polybius: there is no witness so terrible, no accuser so powerful, as conscience, that dwells in the breast of each.

But mark the word Paul uses. A witness. A witness is not a lawgiver. A witness testifies to a standard it did not write — and that means a witness can be suborned. Coached. Handed false evidence from childhood and made to swear to it in perfect sincerity. Here the old Westminster Confession, in its chapter on Christian liberty, says the needed thing exactly:

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it in matters of faith or worship.

God alone is Lord of the conscience. Not Miss Watson. Not the Sunday-school. Not the settled, unanimous, church-going consensus of the whole Missouri shore. The medieval churchman Jean Gerson asked the question Huck never knew he was allowed to ask: to what purpose have I a conscience of my own, if I must live and die according to the conscience of another man?

How does a conscience get bent? Not usually by one dramatic corruption. It gets catechized. Listen again to what the voice inside Huck actually said to him: there was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it, and they'd a learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been acting goes to everlasting fire. That is not the voice of God. That is the voice of a culture that had rewritten the eighth commandment until stealing meant helping a man walk off with his own body, and had taught that reading to children with such total success that the children's own hearts enforced it. The Puritan Ezekiel Hopkins saw the trap whole: no man thinks his conscience erroneous; every one judges himself to be in the right, and to be rightly informed. And the American preacher Edwin Chapin: it is as bad to clip conscience as to clip coin; it is as bad to give a counterfeit statement as a counterfeit bill. A clipped coin still rings when you drop it. A clipped conscience still stings when you cross it. That is what makes the counterfeit pass.

And if you suspect I am reading too much into one hard night, Twain has already run the experiment in both directions. Weeks earlier on the river — the night Jim first scented freedom — the same conscience attacked the same friendship. From earlier in the novel:

I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn't get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn't rest; I couldn't stay still in one place. It hadn't ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn't to blame, because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, "But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody."

He goes on:

That was so—I couldn't get around that noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, "What had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her slave go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That's what she done."

Yet that very night, when the slave-hunters came, Huck shielded Jim with a lie about smallpox aboard — the merciful "wrong" — and listen to the wages his conscience paid him for the mercy:

They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show—when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad—I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that.

There is the bent witness caught in the act. It scorches him for sheltering Jim, and it scorches him for saving Jim, and the boy draws the only conclusion the evidence allows: the wages is just the same. A conscience that charges the same toll in both directions has stopped being a guide at all; it can still burn, but it can no longer point. That is why feeling can never be its own standard — a lesson the wisdom literature drew long before Missouri:

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

Scripture is not naive about this. It knows the malformed conscience as a standing feature of the fallen world. Paul writes to Timothy of those having their conscience seared with a hot iron — an instrument cauterized until it cannot feel what it was made to feel. To the Corinthians he writes of a conscience that misfires in the other direction, condemning what God has not condemned: their conscience being weak is defiled. And the prophet Isaiah pronounces the woe that hangs over every culture that catechizes its children backwards:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Scripture even gives us the case studies. Jesus warned His disciples: the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. Not will pretend — will think. And Paul offers himself as the exhibit, remembering the years he persecuted the church with a clear conscience: I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. I ought — the very word of conscience, deployed in the service of the crime. The man who wrote our text about conscience bearing witness knew from the inside that the witness can be made to lie.

And lest we imagine this was one region's disease in one bad century, Peter tells the scattered churches that a whole inheritance can be corrupt — that redemption is precisely a buying-out from what your own people handed you:

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.

Vain conversation — an empty way of life — received by tradition from your fathers. Peter is writing to people whose consciences were formed by their cultures before Christ ever got a word in, and he does not treat that as unusual. It is the human condition. Jesus said as much about power: ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you. Domination is not one culture's aberration; it is the nations' default setting, the thing every child everywhere absorbs as normal — and the kingdom of God arrives as a contradiction of it. Huck's Missouri was not uniquely wicked. It was ordinarily wicked, with a local vocabulary.

Now go back to the wigwam, because Twain has hidden the sharpest irony in the sweetest moment. Huck writes the letter — the betrayal — and what does he feel? I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life. There it is: the counterfeit absolution. The one moment in the scene when Huck feels justified before heaven is the moment he holds in his hand the paper that would sell his friend back into bondage. A malformed conscience does not merely accuse the innocent; it acquits the guilty. It hands out peace as a reward for the sin.

And yet — this is the wonder of the scene — something in the boy refuses the counterfeit twice over. He kneels to pray, and the words will not come, and he knows why: I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing... but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie — I found that out. Whatever the Sunday-school told him, the boy has stumbled onto the sixty-sixth psalm:

If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.

True doctrine, out of a broken compass. His theology of prayer is perfectly sound; only his map of which thing is the iniquity has been printed upside down. He thinks the lie God sees is his secret loyalty to Jim. In fact the lie was the letter. Heaven, as it were, declined the transaction his culture had approved.

What finally beats the catechism? Notice that it is not an argument. Huck never reasons his way to abolition; he could not have. What defeats fifty years of Missouri is a face. He sets there thinking, and I see Jim before me all the time — standing his watch on top of his own so the boy could sleep, glad in the fog, calling him honey, the best friend old Jim ever had in the world. The abstraction said property. The face said brother. And the apostle John tells us why the face carries that authority: he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? The seen brother is where the unseen God tests us. Huck could not harden himself against what he had seen — which is to say, the law written on his heart, the real one, out-shouted the law written by his culture, and be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful won the night without ever being quoted.

So the boy tears up the letter and says the most misunderstood sentence in American fiction: all right, then, I'll go to hell. Hear it rightly. It is not defiance of God. It is the surrender of a boy who has never once been told that God is on the side of mercy — who believes, with his whole miscatechized heart, that heaven belongs to Miss Watson and the slave system, and who chooses the beloved anyway, at what he honestly believes is the cost of his soul. His guilt is wholly misplaced; his mercy is wholly right; and the deepest tragedy in the scene is that no one in his world ever told him those two things could go together. He damns himself in the direction of Christ.

And notice the sad little coda he attaches: I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. Twice in these pages Huck excuses or accuses himself by his raising — I was brung up wicked, brung up to it. He has the doctrine of inheritance exactly right and the contents exactly wrong. What his raising actually handed him was not the wickedness he confesses but the wickedness he cannot see — the vain tradition of his fathers, Peter would say — while the thing he calls his wickedness, the loyalty to Jim, came from somewhere his culture never touched. He is a boy holding two inheritances, wearing the wrong labels on both.

There is a letter in the New Testament that shows us what Huck's letter would have looked like written by a re-formed conscience. Paul, sending the runaway slave Onesimus back to Philemon, writes:

For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive him for ever; not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord?

Two letters about a runaway. Huck's letter says: your slave is at Pikesville; send the reward. Paul's letter says: receive him for ever, not now as a servant, but a brother beloved. Same legal world, same institution, same paper and ink — and between the two letters stands the whole difference between a conscience formed by a culture and a conscience re-formed under its true Lord.

For that is the last thing to say about conscience: it does not need silencing, and it does not need obeying. It needs redeeming. The letter to the Hebrews:

How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

Purge your conscience — not amputate it. Grace does not turn the accusing voice off; it re-tunes the instrument to the pitch of God's own Word, so that it fears what He forbids and is at peace where He is merciful.

One last look at Twain's warning notice — persons attempting to find a moral in this narrative will be banished. Perhaps the joke is truer than it sounds. You cannot find a moral in the wigwam scene, in the sense of a tidy lesson Huck learns; he leaves it believing he is bound for hell. What you find instead is a witness — a boy's heart testifying, against his whole world and against his own conscience, that mercy is not a sin. Twain banished the moral and left the testimony, and the testimony is the better sermon.

And the re-forming of a conscience is not a thing that happens only in books. History has a man who stood in the real version of Huck's fiction — on the wrong side of it. John Newton, born in London in 1725, lost his mother at seven and went to sea into a wild youth of wandering and sin; the hymn historian Arthur Gregory records that he came through hair-breadth escapes he would later count as interpositions of Providence, and that in after years he called himself the old African blasphemer. His own epitaph says the rest plainly: once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa — for Newton had lived by the buying and selling of men before grace found him. Converted, he entered the Church and became curate of the little town of Olney, the friend and collaborator of the poet Cowper, and with him produced the Olney Hymns. A conscience that a whole trade, a whole economy, a whole respectable world had catechized into calling evil good was taken apart and re-formed by grace — and out of that re-forming came the best-loved hymn in the English language. Hear its first two verses as one man's exact testimony: grace taught his heart to fear — the awakening of a conscience that had slept through years of cruelty — and grace his fears relieved — the re-aiming of it away from despair and toward home.

Our close tonight. From John Newton, the Olney Hymns:

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved; How precious did that grace appear The hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me, His word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, And mortal life shall cease, I shall possess, within the veil, A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine; But God, who called me here below, Will be for ever mine.

May your conscience have no lord but God tonight — awakened by grace, and by grace relieved; and where any voice, however respectable, has taught you to call His mercy sin, may the face of a brother undo the lesson.

Good night.