This is irony rather than humour, but it implies a capacity to see the tragi-comedy of the world, without necessarily losing the power of enthusiasm.  It also explains why Father Faber regarded an honest sense of the ridiculous as a help to goodness.  The man or woman who is impervious to the absurd cannot well be stripped of self-delusion.  For him, for her, there is no shaft which wounds.  The admirable advice of Thomas a Kempis to keep away from people whom we desire to please, and the quiet perfection of his warning to the censorious, “In judging others, a man toileth in vain; for the most part he is mistaken, and he easily sinneth; but in judging and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth with profit,” can make their just appeal only to the humorous sense.  So, too, the counsel of Saint Francis de Sales to the nuns who wanted to go barefooted, “Keep your shoes and change your brains”; the cautious query of Pope Gregory the First, concerning John the Faster, “Does he abstain even from the truth?” Cardinal Newman’s axiom, “It is never worth while to call whity-brown white, for the sake of avoiding scandal”; and Father Faber’s own felicitous comment on religious “hedgers,” “A moderation which consists in taking immoderate liberties with God is hardly what the Fathers of the Desert meant when they preached their crusade in favour of discretion";—­are all spoken to those hardy and humorous souls who can bear to be honest with themselves.

The ardent reformer, intolerant of the ordinary processes of life, the ardent philanthropist, intolerant of an imperfect civilization, the ardent zealot, intolerant of man’s unspiritual nature, are seldom disposed to gayety.  A noble impatience of spirit inclines them to anger or to sadness.  John Wesley, reformer, philanthropist, zealot, and surpassingly great in all three characters, strangled within his own breast the simple desire to be gay.  He was a young man when he formed the resolution, “to labour after continual seriousness, not willingly indulging myself in the least levity of behaviour, or in laughter,—­no, not for a moment”; and for more than fifty years he kept—­probably with no great difficulty—­this stern resolve.  The mediaeval saying, that laughter has sin for a father and folly for a mother, would have meant to Wesley more than a figure of speech.  Nothing could rob him of a dry and bitter humour ("They won’t let me go to Bedlam,” he wrote, “because they say I make the inmates mad, nor into Newgate, because I make them wicked"); but there was little in his creed or in the scenes of his labours to promote cheerfulness of spirit.