Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to deny the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in working conjunction.

You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded in common-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation.  You will, in fact, be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of light, yourself illuminated to the general eye as the very object of chase and doomed quarry of the thing obscure to you.  But to feel its presence and to see it is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in what you are experiencing:  and this of itself spares you the pain of satirical heat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows.  You share the sublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely demonstrate their foolishness.  Moliere was contented to revenge himself on the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of studies in criticism.  A perception of the comic spirit gives high fellowship.  You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we know of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane.  Look there for your unchallengeable upper class!  You feel that you are one of this our civilized community, that you cannot escape from it, and would not if you could.  Good hope sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm you; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly moderated.  Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worlds of imagination or of devotion.  The Comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest songfully poetic.  Chaucer bubbles with it:  Shakespeare overflows:  there is a mild moon’s ray of it (pale with super-refinement through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus.  Pope has it, and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper.  It is only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling, transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office:  and then, in extreme cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp:  as, for example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere:  at which the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the worshipful may be in alliance:  I know not how far comic, or how much assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its appearance:  at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.  Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by the Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that it enlivens.  It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when one of the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuring