



Produced by David Widger





COMIC BIBLE SKETCHES

Reprinted From "The Freethinker"


By G. W. Foote


Part I.

London:

Progressive Publishing Company

28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.

1885.




INTRODUCTION.



English literature has its Comic Histories, its Comic Grammars, its
Comic Geographies, and its Comic Law-Books, and Carlyle once prophesied
that it would some day boast its Comic Bible. Tough as the fine old
Sage of Chelsea was, he predicted this monstrosity with something of the
horror a barbarian might feel at the thought of some irreverent fellow
deliberately laughing at the tribal fetish. But what shocked our
latter-day prophet so greatly in mere anticipation has partially come to
pass. "La Bible Amusante" has had an extensive sale in France, and the
infectious irreverence has extended itself to England. Notwithstanding
that Mr. G. R. Sims, when he saw the first numbers of that abominable
publication, piously turned up the whites of his eyes, and declared his
opinion that no English Freethinker, however extreme, would think of
reproducing or imitating them, there were found persons so utterly
abandoned as not to scruple at this unparalleled profanity. Several
of the French drawings were copied with more or less fidelity in the
_Freethinker_, a scandalous print, as the Christians love to describe
it, which has been prosecuted twice for Blasphemy, and whose editor,
proprietor and publisher, have been punished respectively with twelve,
nine and three months' imprisonment like common felons, all for the
glory and honor of God, for the satisfaction of his dear Son, and for
the vindication of the Holy Spirit. In many cases the French originals
could not be reproduced in England, owing to their Gallic flavor. A
Parisian artist, disporting himself among those highly moral histories
in the Bible which our youths and maidens discover with unerring
instinct, was not a spectacle which one could dare to exhibit before
the pious and chaste British public; any more than an English poet could
follow the lead of Evariste Parny in his "Guerre des Dieux" and "Les
Amours de la Bible." But many others were free from this objection, and
a selection of them served as a basis for the Freethinker artist to work
on. A few were copied pretty closely; some were elaborated and adapted
to our national taste; while others furnished a central suggestion,
which was treated in an independent manner. By-and-bye, as the insular
diffidence wore off, and the minds of the Freethinker staff played
freely on the subject, a new departure was taken; novel ideas were
worked out, and Holy Writ was ransacked for fresh comicalities. Dullards
prophesied a speedy exhaustion of Bible topics, but they did not know
how inexhaustible it is in absurdities. Properly read, it is the most
comical book in the world; and one might say of it, as Enobarbus says
of Cleopatra, that Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale; it's infinite
variety.

The following Comic Bible Sketches, which will be succeeded in due
course by others, comprise all those worth preserving that appeared
in the Freethinker before its editor, proprietor and publisher were
imprisoned, including the drawings they were prosecuted for by that
pious guinea: pig, Sir Henry Tyler, who had his dirty fingers severely
rapped by Lord Coleridge, after spending several hundred pounds of
somebody's money in an unsuccessful Blasphemy prosecution, in order to
patch up his threadbare reputation, and perhaps also with a faint hope
of cheating the Almighty into reserving him a front-seat ticket for the
dress-circle in heaven.

The French Comic Bible prints under each illustration a few crisp lines
of satiric narrative. This plan has its advantages; it allows, for
instance, the writer's pen to curvet as well as the artist's pencil. But
it is after all less effective than the plan we have adopted. We merely
give each picture a comprehensive and striking title, and print beneath
it the Bible text which is illustrated. By this means the satire is
greatly heightened. Not even the sentences of a Voltaire could so
illuminate and emphasise the grotesqueness of each topic as this
juxtaposition of the solemnly absurd Scripture with the gaily absurd
illustration.

The same spirit has animated us in designing the pictures. Our object
has been to take the Bible text always as our basis, to include
no feature which is contradicted by it, and to introduce as many
comicalities and anachronisms as possible consistently with this rule.
We are therefore able to defy criticism. Bibliolators may vituperate us,
persecute us, or imprison us, but they cannot refute us.. We can safely
challenge them to prove that a single incident happened otherwise than
we have depicted it. We can candidly say to them--"The thing must have
happened in some way, as to which the Divine Word is silent; this is