After a time some attempts were made to render the Bible in a form specially for children's reading. There was a rhymed adaptation called the Bible in Verse. This was not the Bible versification of Samuel Wesley, printed in 1717, of which he says condescendingly, "Some passages here represented are so barren of Circumstances that it was not easy to make them shine in Verse." Older hands had essayed to rhyme the Bible; one was called A Briefe Somme of the Bible.
These Bible abridgments were literally little books, usually three or four inches long, covered with brown or mottled paper. One tiny, well-worn book of Bible stories was but two inches long and an inch wide. It had two hundred and fifty pages, each of about twenty words.
There was also the famous Thumb Bible printed by the Boston book printers, Mein and Fleming. A copy of this may be seen at the Lenox Library in New York City. The Hieroglyphick Bible with Emblematick Figures was illustrated with five hundred tiny pictures set with the print, which helped to tell the story after the manner of an illustrated rebus. Bewick made the cuts for the English edition. Tiny catechisms were widely printed and sought after, and used as gifts to good and godly children. There were also dull little books of parables, modelled on the parables of the Bible. Those were profoundly religious, but were so darkly and figuratively expressed as to be frequently entirely incomprehensible; and they fully realized the definition of a parable given by a child I know—"a heavenly story with no earthly meaning."
Page of Hieroglyphick Bible
An extremely curious and antiquated religious panada was entitled the History of the Holy Jesus. The seventh edition was printed in New London in 1754. The illustrations in this stupid little book were more surprising than the miserable text. No attempt was made to represent Oriental scenery. The picture of an earthquake showed a group of toy houses and a substantial church of the type of the Old South in perfect condition, tipped over and leaning solidly on each other. The Prodigal Son returned to an English manor-house with latticed windows, and the women wore high commodes and hoop-skirts. In the cut intended to represent to the inquiring young Christian in New England the Adoration of the Magi, the wise men of the East appear in the guise of prosperous British merchants; in cocked hats, knee breeches, and full-skirted coats with great flapped pockets, they look wisely at the star-spotted heavens, and a mammoth and extremely conventionalized comet through British telescopes mounted on tripods. The Slaughter of the Innocents must have seemed painfully close at hand when Yankee children looked at the trim military platoons of English-clad infants, each waving an English flag; while Herod, in a modern uniform, on a horse with modern trappings, charged upon them. Perhaps some of the fathers and mothers born in England and in the Church of England had a still more vivid realization of Herod's crime, for it was the custom in some English parishes at one time to whip all the children on Holy Innocent's Day. As Gregory said:—
"It hath been a custom to whip up the children upon Innocent's Day morning, that the memorie of this murther might stick the closer; and in a moderate proportion to act over the crueltie again in kind."
The book was in rhyme. Here are a few of the verses:—
"The Wise Men from the East do come
Led by a Shining Star.
And offer to the new born King
Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh.
Which Herod hears & wrathful Grows
And now by Heavn's Decree
Joseph and Mary and her Son
Do into Ægypt flee.
The Bloody Wretch enrag'd to think
Christ's Death he could not gain,
Commands that Infants all about
Bethlehem should be slain.
But O! to hear the awful cries
Of Mothers in Distress,
And Rachel mourns for her first-born
Snatch'd from her tender Breast."