by talking about the butler or the postman, then it is serious, because it is universal.  So far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious questions, it is one’s duty to use silly metaphors on serious questions.  It is the test of one’s seriousness.  It is the test of a responsible religion or theory whether it can take examples from pots and pans and boots and butter-tubs.  It is the test of a good philosophy whether you can defend it grotesquely.  It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiar habit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar to mine have probably noticed also.  It goes along with the fixed belief of printers that to be a Rationalist is the same thing as to be a Nationalist.  I mean the printer’s tendency to turn the word “cosmic” into the word “comic.”  It annoyed me at the time.  But since then I have come to the conclusion that the printers were right.  The democracy is always right.  Whatever is cosmic is comic.

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously.  It is that all grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness.  Unless a thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified.  Why is it funny that a man should sit down suddenly in the street?  There is only one possible or intelligent reason:  that man is the image of God.  It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down.  No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down.  No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down.  No man stops in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down.  The fall of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity.  The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously.  It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh.  Why do we laugh?  Because it is a grave religious matter:  it is the Fall of Man.  Only man can be absurd:  for only man can be dignified.

The above, which occupies the great part of my article, is a parenthises.  It is time that I returned to my choleric correspondent who rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of Spiritualism.  My correspondent, who is evidently an intelligent man, is very angry with me indeed.  He uses the strongest language.  He says I remind him of a brother of his:  which seems to open an abyss or vista of infamy.  The main substance of his attack resolves itself into two propositions.  First, he asks me what right I have to talk about Spiritualism at all, as I admit I have never been to a seance.  This is all very well, but there are a good many things to which I have never been, but I have not the smallest intention of leaving off talking about them.  I refuse (for instance) to leave off talking about the Siege of Troy.  I decline to be mute in the matter of the French Revolution.  I will not be silenced