The Word Made Fresh

It's the middle of the the nineteenth century. You desperately want to get your religious point across. Your sermons don't seem to be doing the trick, or at least they don't get disseminated far enough in this age before MP3s, blogs, cassette tapes or even a decent sound system. What to do? What to do?

Well, you could put your religious ideas to bad, maudlin poetry and illustrate them with naive allegorical engravings, some hand-colored to be sure no one misses the point. Infuse the whole thing with a good dose of pietistic legalism and you'll have a work that will stand for the ages. Or at least entertain suspicious, cynical types like me 150 years later.

The two colored engravings above are the title page sequence illustrations. I really like the one showing the sinner being rescued from drowning by the angel with the lifeline. It reminds me of the analogy a young woman used to explain Calvinistic predestination to me in college. "You might think of us as drowning in the ocean, and the Holy Spirit is throwing us a life preserver that we have to grab on to," she said. "That's how most American evangelicals think of the gospel -- as a life preserver that gets thrown out and you have to grab on to it and be saved. But really the Bible teaches that sinners are dead spiritually; they aren't treading water about to drown, they are already drowned and sitting on the bottom of the ocean, and the Spirit has to breathe new life into them for them to be able to accept the gospel."

I eventually saw her point theologically, but even she would have to admit that it would be much harder to illustrate the breathing-life-into-the- dead-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-thing than the version I held to at the time.