of the heart or fattier degeneration of the
head. Priestcraft nourishes hope in the scientific laboratory, and feels
only faint misgivings in academic halls; but it pales and withers at the
smile of scepticism, and hears in a low laugh the note of the trump of
doom.

Ridicule can never injure truth. What it hurts must be false. Laugh at
the multiplication-table as much as you please, and twice two will still
make four.

Pictorial ridicule has the immense advantage of visualising absurdities.
Lazy minds, or those accustomed to regard a subject with the reverence
of prejudice, read without realising. But the picture supplies the
deficiency of their imagination, translates words into things, and
enables them to see what had else been only a vague sound.

Christians read the Bible without realising its wonders, allowing
themselves to be cheated with words. Mr. Herbert Spencer has remarked
that the image of the Almighty hand launching worlds into space is very
fine until you try to form a mental picture of it, when it is found to
be utterly irrealisable. In the same way, the Creation Story is passable
until you image the Lord making a clay man and blowing up his nose;
or the story of Samson until you picture him slaying file after file of
well-armed soldiers with the jaw-bone of a costermonger's pony.

Let it be observed that these Comic Bible Sketches ridicule nothing but
miracles. Mr. Mathew Arnold has said that the Bible miracles are only
fairy tales (very poor ones, by the way) and their reign is doomed. We
only seek to hasten their deposition. Whatever the Bible contains of
truth, goodness and beauty, we prize as well as its blindest devotees.
But this valuable deposit of antiquity would be more useful if cleared
of the rubbish of superstition. It is not the good, but the evil parts
of the Bible, that are supported by its supernaturalism. Why should
civilised Englishmen go walking about in Hebrew Old-Clothes? Let us heed
Carlyle's stern monition:--"The Jew old-clothes having now grown fairly
pestilential, a poisonous incumbrance in the path of of men, burn them
up with revolutionary fire."

A word in conclusion. The editor of the "Manchester Examiner," writing
over the well-Known signature of "Verax," recently published a long
article, censuring the policy of aggressive Freethought, and declaring
that to laugh at the absurdities of the Bible was to insult the human
race. We might as well, he said, laugh at our poor