Old folk used to search the Scriptures very diligently here, and picked up words and phrases that they used in most embarrassing ways. One old lady told me in sorrow and in wrath, “The Parson, he come here, and I spoke Scripture to’n. And ‘good mornin’,’ he saith, ‘good mornin’,’ and up he were and away over they steps ’fore I could say another word.” I found that she had used some words the Parson had to read in church but did not wish to hear elsewhere.
I have two volumes here of Miracles and Lives of Saints, with coloured plates; and two small children who came to stay with me, used to call them the Funny Books, as the pictures in them were so funny. By the time these children came again, they had just learned to read; but I forgot this when I let them have the Funny Books again, and presently a little voice read out, “Now a certain nun became with child, and....” I stopped the reading, but could not stop the questions that they asked.
A small boy of my acquaintance had duly learned to say his prayers and was having a course of Scripture stories, but went on strike when he was told of the creation of Eve. He said that it was mean of God to put Adam to sleep and then take a rib away; and to show God what he thought of it, he would stop off saying his prayers. The strike lasted for six weeks.
The creation of Eve is sculptured in relief on the Campanile at Florence and on the Façade of Orvieto Cathedral; and in these reliefs (and also in some others) the sculptors have kept closely to their text, ‘God created Man in his own image.’ Adam and the Creator are exactly alike, even in the growth of the beard and the arrangement of the hair--the same model served for both. Anthropomorphism is an artifice that must be used, and I think those sculptors used it more effectively than Michaelangelo. In his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he makes Adam a young man of twenty and the Creator an old man of seventy, not the least like Adam, and neither human nor divine. There is a picture by Pesellino in the National Gallery (No. 727) portraying the three Persons of the Trinity. An old lady told me, forty years ago, that she took one of her maids there soon after this picture had arrived: the maid stared at the First Person for some considerable time, and then said, “Lor’, mum, d’you think it’s like?”