The Serio-Comic Profession ~ Paperback ~ L J De Bekker

Excerpt from The Serio-Comic Profession: A Book for Writers, and for Such Readers as May Be Interested in Them and Their Craft "Perhaps to your way of thinking, and I know your familiarity with Rabelais and Erasmus, the Serio-Comic Profession is that which, a few centuries ago, embraced them all? Taking the Alpha and Omega of comedy and seriousness from the daily newspapers, you will offer in evidence the utterances of the Reverend 'Billy' Sunday, and those of his Eminence the Cardinal Primate of Belgium, and say that the casual reader will glance at the title of my book, and mistake it for a treatise on theology?" "No. I grant you that this might be the impression left on a mind influenced by such Master Humanitarians as those you have named. But there is no more reason to suppose that the Reverend Mr. Sunday or his followers could be brought to look up on 'hitting the trail' as comic, than that any one would regard Cardinal Archbishop Mercier's pastoral as a ribald jest - that is, of course, outside the German universities. And please understand that I take religion seriously. That is, when I don't my wife does." "Pray be assured," I hastened to reply, "that no one takes religion more seriously than I do. Years ago I was a postulate in theology, and although 'dismissed at his own request, and for causes not affecting his moral character, ' as the good Bishop put it, your loving colleague still dips into the Fathers occasionally. But in stumbling over the XXXIX Articles he found that the dust of this planet included more systems of religion than ever came out of Judea. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.