And Man, the chief of all, his God forsakes.
Yet by th’ Almighty’s Mercy ‘twas decreed,
Heaven’s Heir should satisfie for Man’s misdeed.
Men now live long, but do not act aright,
For which the flood destroys them all but eight;
Noah, his Wife, their Sons, with those they wedd:
The rest all perish’d in that watery Bed.
Read here of Abraham’s numberless increase,
And of their journeying, and his own decease.
Of Israel’s going into Egypt’s Land,
Of their Abode, their Entertainment, and
Of Joseph’s Brethren, faithless and unkind,
Of his firm faith, and ever-constant mind.
He pardons them that did his death devise;
He sees his Children’s Children, and he dies.Verbum Sempiternum, which remained in print for nearly two centuries, provided a
model for Benjamin Harris’s Holy Bible in Verse, which substituted a rollicking
tetrameter for Taylor’s pentameter:
This book contains a full relation
Of God Almighty’s wise Creation,
Who by his Power in six Days,
The Earth did frame and Heav’n raise.First printed in London c. 1712, it was imported to Boston in 1717. Nathaniel Crouch
also versified Bible material in Youth’s Divine Pastime (2 vols) and used trimeters. A
second volume (1720) turned towards violent death and lurid sex as it recounted stories
like Lot’s incest, in which his daughters made him ‘drunk with Wine,/And then both
with him lye;/He being ignorant of this,/Their wanton policy.’
Bibles edited for children in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were usually
illustrated. On occasion, however, pictures alone were printed to elicit spontaneous
tellings of Bible stories. Such picture albums, of varying graphic and aesthetic merit,
were directed at adult buyers all over central, western and northern Europe for use in
the family circle. One early example that may stand for many was The History of the Old
and New Testament described in Figures (London c. 1670). Typical for the late eighteenth
century was Sarah Trimmer’s Series of Prints from the Old Testament (London 1797),
which was soon joined by her publisher’s New Series of Prints for Scripture History (1803
et seq.) and—in the chapbook market—by the twenty-four page New Pictorial Bible.
Hieroglyphic Bibles, like Elisha Coles’s Youth’s Visible Bible (London 1675), became
popular in the USA in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The full title of an early import, published by Isaiah Thomas in Worcester,
Massachusetts in 1788, advertised its intent:
RELIGIOUS WRITING FOR CHILDREN 267Jehovah here of Nothing, all things makes,