re about humour than did Father Faber; Father Faber
knew more about "grace" than did Sir Leslie Stephen; and both
disputants were widely acquainted with their fellow men. Sir Leslie
Stephen had a pretty wit of his own, but it may have lacked the
qualities which make for holiness. There was in it the element of
denial. He seldom entered the shrine where we worship our ideals in
secret. He stood outside, remarks Mr. Birrell cheerily, "with a pail
of cold water." Father Faber also possessed a vein of irony which
was the outcome of a priestly experience with the cherished foibles
of the world. He entered unbidden into the shrine where we worship
our illusions in secret, and chilled us with unwelcome truths. I know
of no harder experience than this. It takes time and trouble to
persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we
ought to do. We balance our spiritual accounts with care. We insert
glib phrases about duty into all our reckonings. There is nothing,
or next to nothing, which cannot, if adroitly catalogued, be
considered a duty; and it is this delicate mental adjustment which
is disturbed by Father Faber's ridicule. "Self-deceit," he
caustically observes, "seems to thrive on prayer, and to grow fat
on contemplation."

If a sense of humour forces us to be candid with ourselves, then it
can be reconciled, not only with the cardinal virtues--which are but
a chilly quartette--but with the flaming charities which have
consumed the souls of saints. The true humourist, objects Sir Leslie
Stephen, sees the world as a tragi-comedy, a Vanity Fair, in which
enthusiasm is out of place. But if the true humourist also sees
himself presiding, in the sacred name of duty, over a booth in Vanity
Fair, he may yet reach perfection. What Father Faber opposed so
strenuously were, not the vanities of the profane, of the openly and
cheerfully unregenerate; but the vanities of a devout and
fashionable congregation, making especial terms--by virtue of its
exalted station--with Providence. These were the people whom he
regarded all his priestly life with whimsical dismay. "Their
voluntary social arrangements," he wrote in "Spiritual
Conferences," "are the tyranny of circumstance, claiming our
tenderest pity, and to be managed like the work of a Xavier, or a
Vincent of Paul, which hardly left the saints time to pray. Their
sheer worldliness is to be considered as an interior trial, with all
manner of cloudy grand things to b