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, 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.
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