Heavenly Discourse is a collection of satirical essays by Charles Erskine Scott Wood

Charles Erskine Scott Wood

Charles Erskine Scott Wood was an author, civil libertarian, soldier, and attorney. He is best known as the author of the 1927 satirical bestseller, Heavenly Discourse.-Early life:...

, published in 1927.

It is written in the form of plays or discussions between such characters as God

God

God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

, Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

, Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

, Tom Paine

Thomas Paine

Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...

, Robert Ingersoll

Robert G. Ingersoll

Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll was a Civil War veteran, American political leader, and orator during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism. He was nicknamed "The Great Agnostic."-Life and career:Robert Ingersoll was born in Dresden, New York...

, Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday

William Ashley "Billy" Sunday was an American athlete who, after being a popular outfielder in baseball's National League during the 1880s, became the most celebrated and influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the 20th century.Born into poverty in Iowa, Sunday spent some...

, and Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...

. Politically radical, the essays ridicule militarism, prudery, and religious intolerance.

Ten of them were originally written for and published in Max Eastman

Max Eastman

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...

's radical magazine, The Masses

The Masses

The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the U.S. from 1911 until 1917, when Federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later The New Masses...

, the first of them in 1914. Following passage of the Espionage Act of 1917

Espionage Act of 1917

The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18, Crime...

, The Masses was suppressed by the U. S. government on the grounds that it was detrimental to the war effort. Wood continued to write more discourses and in 1927, the Vanguard Press published a collection of forty-one of them under the title Heavenly Discourse. Titles of some of the discourses include Is God a Jew?, The United States Must Be Pure, and The Stupid Cannot Enter Heaven.

In Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday

William Ashley "Billy" Sunday was an American athlete who, after being a popular outfielder in baseball's National League during the 1880s, became the most celebrated and influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the 20th century.Born into poverty in Iowa, Sunday spent some...

 meets God, Sunday is surprised to find people he condemned in heaven. "Why, there is Herman Morgenstern. I sent him to hell. He kept a family beer garden

Beer garden

Beer garden is an open-air area where beer, other drinks and local food are served. The concept originates from and is most common in Southern Germany...

 on Fourth Avenue in New York... What is he doing here?" Jesus replies "I liked him. He was a gentle, charitable soul." Sunday objects that he kept a beer salon, and Jesus replies "I lived with publican

Publican

In antiquity, publicans were public contractors, in which role they often supplied the Roman legions and military, managed the collection of port duties, and oversaw public building projects...

s and sinners." Sunday complains about the presence in Heaven of a woman who had had an illegitimate child; Jesus replies "I liked her. The one with her is Mary Magdalen."

From A Pacifist enters Heaven—in bits:

BATTERED SOUL: I'm a pacifist.

GOD: A what?

BATTERED SOUL: A pacifist. I believe in Jesus and peace.

GOD: So you are a Christian?

BATTERED SOUL: O, no. I really do believe in peace.

In a discourse on Preparedness in Heaven, God decides to prepare for a war against Satan.

GABRIEL: I am afraid Heaven won't stand for that. Jesus has preached peace too long.

GOD: ...We must first frighten them, fill them with fear, then with hate. For example, headlines in the Heavenly Herald: "Horrible Atrocities of Satan," "Make the Cosmos Safe for Jesus," "Satan Threatens Your Halos," "Satan Disembowels a Cherub," "Satan Rapes the Ten Foolish Virgins," and so on...

GABRIEL: But none of this will be true.

GOD: True? Of course, it won't. Don't be a fool, Gabriel. You can't work up a war—preparedness, I mean—on the truth. This is war—I mean preparedness—and we simply must lie—the more horrible the lies the better.