A Lesson From Huckleberry Finn

On this matter of our supposed emancipation from morality, may we forthrightly reaffirm this fact: that unhappiness, frustration, and impairment of the minds and lives of young and old alike, come with failure to keep the commandments.

Explain it any way you will, in technical or in commonplace terms, or in the jargon of those who want to rid themselves of all restraint, yet it all adds up to an overwhelming evidence that we are dealing with eternal truths, and that men cannot escape the consequences of their own conduct⎯and that they pay a heavy price when they degrade their bodies, minds, and morals.

Well, we can’t leave it there. There has to be an answer⎯and there is: The answer is the simple, honest process of repentance. But to be relieved of any heavy burden, repentance must go deep beyond the surface⎯a repentance that is honestly sincere⎯a change of heart, of life; a real and literal departure from the errors of the past. And those who try to lift the load in any other way will not find the peace they so much seek.

This point is made by Mark Twain in the simple, honest, ungrammatical word of Huckleberry Finn: “It made me shiver,” he said, “And I about made up my mind to pray and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of 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….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 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.”¹

So much for a lesson learned by Huckleberry Finn⎯a lesson all of us must sometime learn.