and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional.  The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh.  One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, sanctified by nothing but the gravest of smiles.  What wonder that humanity is dejected at the thought of an existence from which all possibility of innocent absurdity and kindly mirth is subtracted—­the only things which have persistently lightened and beguiled the earthly pilgrimage!  That is why the death of a humorous person has so deep an added tinge of melancholy about it, because it is apt to seem indecorous to think of what was his most congenial and charming trait still finding scope for its exercise.  We are never likely to be able to tolerate the thought of Death, while we continue to think of it as a thing which will rob humanity of some of its richest and most salient characteristics.

Even the ghastly humour of Milton is a shade better than this.  It will be remembered that he makes the archangel say to Adam that astronomy has been made by the Creator a complicated subject, in order that the bewilderment of scientific men may be a matter of entertainment to Him!

               “He His fabric of the Heavens
     Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
     His laughter at their quaint opinions wide.”

Or, again, we may remember the harsh contortions of dry cachinnation indulged in by the rebel spirits, when they have succeeded in toppling over with their artillery the armed hosts of Seraphim.  Milton certainly did not intend to subtract all humour from the celestial regions.  The only pity was that he had not himself emerged beyond the childish stage, which finds its deepest amusement in the disasters and catastrophes of stately persons.

It may be asked whether we have any warrant in the Gospel for the Christian exercise of humour.  I have no doubt of it myself.  The image of the children in the market-place who cannot get their peevish companions to join in games, whether merry or mournful, as illustrating the attitude of the Pharisees who blamed John the Baptist for asceticism and Christ for sociability, is a touch of real humour; and the story of the importunate widow with the unjust judge, who betrayed so naively his principle of judicial action by saying “Though I fear not God, neither regard men, yet will I avenge this widow, lest by her continual coming she weary me,” must—­I cannot believe otherwise—­have been intended to provoke the hearers’ mirth.  There is not, of course, any superabundance of such instances, but Christ’s reporters were not likely to be on the look-out for sayings of this type.  Yet I find it impossible to believe that One who touched all the stops of the human heart, and whose stories are