Not Frail, Not Pale

Thanks to parents and Sunday-school teachers, children generally get a distorted, sissified impression of Christ. So says Author Alan Devoe in the current issue of the American Mercury. "When I was a schoolboy," writes Devoe, "I was told that once upon a time there had been a fine and honorable man named Abraham Lincoln ... a good and grave and great man . . . When I saw a picture of Abraham Lincoln I could immediately believe it."

It was the same with Washington, or Daniel Boone, or John James Audubon, or Henry Clay. But in Sunday school, he was told of "a Figure for whom was made an infinitely more enormous claim than for any of the others." The picture showed him as "a pale and posturing person with immoderately long, silky hair . . . who clutched a kind of diaphanous drapery gracefully about him" with an expression of "simpering vapidity."

"It was into this hand, so unmistakably the limp and clammy hand of an effeminate curate, that little boys were to put theirs trustingly .. . This was the pietistic poseur--the very spit of every disgusting little 'teacher's pet' . . . that we were to take as the earthly evidence of what The Everlasting God is like."

Noting that the New Testament contains no description of Christ's appearance, Devoe insists that it does tell "enough about the manner of his speech and the habits of his days to give us at least the surety that he was not frail, not pale, not piously smirking, not actorishly barbered and finical. He was one who spoke homely and strong."

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