I do not think that Humour has ever enjoyed its due repute in the ethical scale.  The possession of it saves a man from priggishness; and the possession of faith, hope, and charity does not.  Indeed, not only do these three virtues not save a man from priggishness—­ they sometimes even plunge him in irreclaimable depths of superiority.  I suppose that when Christianity was first making itself felt in the world, the one quality needful was a deep-seated and enthusiastic earnestness.  There is nothing that makes life so enjoyable as being in earnest.  It is not the light, laughter-loving, jocose people who have the best time in the world.  They have a chequered career.  They skip at times upon the hills of merriment, but they also descend gloomily at other times into the valleys of dreariness.  But the man who is in earnest is generally neither merry nor dreary.  He has not time to be either.  The early Christians, engaged in leavening the world, had no time for levity or listlessness.  A pioneer cannot be humorous.  But now that the world is leavened and Christian principles are theoretically, if not practically, taken for granted, a new range of qualities comes in sight.  By humour I do not mean a taste for irresponsible merriment; for though humour is not a necessarily melancholy thing, in this imperfect world the humorist sighs as often as he smiles.  What I mean by it is a keen perception of the rich incongruities and absurdities of life, its undue solemnity, its guileless pretentiousness.  To be true humour, it must not be at all a cynical thing—­as soon as it becomes cynical, it loses all its natural grace; it is an essentially tender-hearted quality, apt to find excuse, ready to condone, eager to forgive.  The possessor of it can never be ridiculous, or heavy, or superior.  Wit, of course, is a very small province of humour:  wit is to humour what lightning is to the electric fluid—­a vivid, bright, crackling symptom of it in certain conditions; but a man may be deeply and essentially humorous, and never say a witty thing in his life.  To be witty, one has to be fanciful, intellectual, deft, light-hearted; and the humorist need be none of these things.

In religion, the absence of a due sense of humour has been the cause of some of our worst disasters.  All rational people know that what has done most to depress and discount religion is ecclesiasticism.  The spirit of ecclesiasticism is the spirit that confuses proportions, that loves what is unimportant, that hides great principles under minute rules, that sacrifices simplicity to complexity, that adores dogma, and definition, and labels of every kind, that substitutes the letter for the spirit.  The greatest misfortune that can befall religion is that it should become logical, that it should evolve a reasoned system from insufficient data; but humour abhors logic, and cannot pin its faith on insecure deductions.  The heaviest burden which religion can have to bear is the burden of tradition,