The True Northerner

Holy Humor.

The Rev. G. B. Wilcox, writing in the Independent, begins a dissertation on the "Wit and Humor of the Bible," thus:

"Shocking!" many a good old saint will cry, at the very thought of it. "The Bible a jest book? What godless folly shall we have up next?" No, the Bible is not a jest book. But there is within it wit of the first quality; and a good reason why it should be there. Take a few specimens.

Job, in his thirtieth chapter, is telling how he scorned the low-lived fellows who pretend to look down on him in his adversities. They are fools. They belonged to the long-eared fraternity. Anybody, with less wit, might come out bluntly and call them asses. But Job puts it more deftly (xxx., 7): "Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together." If that is not wit, there is no such thing as wit. And yet the commentators don't see it, or won't see it. They are perfectly wooden when they come to any such gleam of humor.

Take another instance-Elijah's ridicule of the Prophets of Baal. They are clamoring to their God to help them out of a very awkward predicament. And, while they are at it, the prophet shows them up in a way that must have made the people roar with laughter. The stiff, antiquated style of our English Bible tames down his sallies. Take them in modern phrase. These quack prophets have worked themselves into a perfect desperation, and are capering about on the altar as if they had the St. Vitus' dance. The scene (I. Kings, xviii., 26, 27) wakes up all Elijah's sense of the ridiculous. "Shout louder! He is a god you know. Make him hear! Perhaps he is chatting with somebody, or he is off on a hunt, or gone traveling. Or may be he is taking a nap. Shout away! Wake him up!" Imagine the priests going through their antics on the altar, while Elijah bombards them in this style, at his leisure. If Mr. Beecher ever said anything that convulsed his audience more thoroughly than the prophet must have done the Jews around him, I should like to hear it.

Paul shows a dry humor more than once, as in II. Cor., xii., 13: "Why haven't you fared as well as the other churches? Ah! there is one grievance-that you haven't had me to support! Pray do not lay it up against me!"

These instances might be multiplied from the Old and New Testament both. What do they show? That the Bible is, on the whole, a humorous book? Far from it. That religion is a humorous subject, that we are to throw all the wit we can into the treatment of it? No. But they show that the sense of the ludicrous is put into a man by his Maker; that it has its uses; and that we are not to be ashamed of it, or to roll up our eyes in holy horror of it.