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 o