Page:Annie Besant, Is the Bible Indictable.djvu/17

. I know of no other book in which is to be found such utterly unredeemed coarseness. The rest of Ezekiel is only bloodthirsty and brutal, so may, fortunately, be passed over without further comment. Daniel may be left unnoticed; and we now come to Hosea, a prophet whose morals were, to speak gently, peculiar. The "beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea," was the Lord's command as to his marriage, related in Hosea i. 2; we then hear of his children by the said wife in the remainder of the chapter, and in the next chapter we are told, Hosea ii. 2, that the woman is not his wife, and from verse 2—13 we have an extremely indecent speech of Hosea on the misdeeds of the unfortunate creature he married, wherein, verse 4, he complains of the very fact that God commanded in chap. i. 2. Hosea iii. 1—3 relates another indecent proceeding on Hosea's part, and his purchase of another mistress; whether girls' morals are improved by the contemplation of such divine commands, is a question that might fairly be urged on Lord Sandon before he next distributes Bibles to little children of both sexes. The said girls must surely, as they study Hosea iv. 10—18, wonder that God expresses his intention not to punish impurity in verse 14. It is impossible, in reading Hosea, to escape from the prevailing tone of obscenity; chaps. v. 3, 4, 7; vi. 9, 10; vii. 4; viii. 9; ix. 1, 10, 11, 14, 16; xii. 3; xiii. 13, every one of these has a thought in it that all must regard as coarse, and which comes distinctly within the ruling of the Lord Chief Justice as to obscenity; there is scarcely one chapter in Hosea that does not, with offensive reiteration, dwell on the coarsest form of wrongdoing of which women are capable. Joel iii. 3 is objectionable in a comparatively slight degree. Amos, although occasionally coarse, keeps clear of the gross obscenity of Hosea, as do also Obadiah and Jonah. Micah i. 7, 8, 11, would scarcely be passed by Sir Hardinge Giffard, nor would he approve Micah iv. 9, 10. Nahum iii. 4—6 is almost Hoseatic, and Habakkuk ii. 5, 16 runs it close. The remaining four prophets are sometimes coarse, but have nothing in them approaching the abominations of the others, and we close the Old Testament with a sigh of relief.

The New Testament has in it nothing at all approaching the obscenity of the Old, save two passages in Revelation. The story of Mary and Joseph is somewhat coarse, especially as told in Matt. i. 18—25. Rom. i. 24—27 is distinctly