



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