The Good Humor of the Saints [pp. 127-138]

1882.] THE GOOD HUMOA' OF THE SAINTS. 127
ENVOY.
Now, the beauty of these and their grace have birth
In the splendor that beams from God's high place,
And falls on the thousand things of earth The poem, the flower, the heart, the face Endowering them with this sum of their worth:
The beauty thereof, the unspeakable grace.
THE GOOD HUMOR OF THE SAINTS.
"AN honest, humorous sense of ridicule," says Father Faber,
"is a great help to holiness." And, by way of rendering this
statement still more emphatic, he adds: "Perhaps nature does
not contribute a greater help to grace than this." Here, then,
is a deliberate opinion which, however startling to some of our
preconceived notions, carries with it a double weight in view of
the writer's great sanctity and undoubted sense of humor. In
him, as in Cardinal Newman, a keen satiric power blends ever
with a spirit of simple piety, and the two work together as harmoniously as in some Qf the early Fathers of the church. All the
little foibles of human nature lie bare before him, and he touches
them with a caustic grace, severe yet not unpitying.
But nowadays we have come, strangely enough, to regard
humor as a natural foe to religion, for no particular reason except that so many modern humorists appear to be irreligious;
in the same way that some of us imagine scientific study to a
dangerous ground, simply because a handful of modern scientists have apparently forgotten their God. We have a shadowy
idea that humor is given to poking fun at holy things-relics,
miracles, and such-and that it is best in our spiritual life to
lay it entirely aside and keep ourselves within the safe limit of
dulness, reserving our brighter parts for worldly matters alone.
Yet because men of the Mark Twain type have a jeer ever ready
for things they fail to understand, we need not suppose that
there is no proper field for that sense of fun which was manifestly given us for some good purpose. Humor is born partly
of keen perceptive powers, partly of natural lightness of heart;
and thus the holy men who have adorned the history of the
church, having been wont to study human nature freely and