metaphors on serious questions.
It is the test of one's seriousness. It is the test of a responsible
religion or theory whether it can take examples from pots and pans and
boots and butter-tubs. It is the test of a good philosophy whether you
can defend it grotesquely. It is the test of a good religion whether you
can joke about it.

When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiar
habit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar to
mine have probably noticed also. It goes along with the fixed belief of
printers that to be a Rationalist is the same thing as to be a
Nationalist. I mean the printer's tendency to turn the word "cosmic"
into the word "comic." It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have
come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is
always right. Whatever is cosmic is comic.

Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that
we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all
grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless a
thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a man
should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible or
intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny that
anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one
sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate
absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars
with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of
thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high
buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we
laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is
the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The above, which occupies the great part of my article, is a
parenthises. It is time that I returned to my choleric correspondent who
rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of Spiritualism. My
correspondent, who is evidently an intelligent man, is very angry with
me indeed. He uses the strongest language. He says I remind him of a
brother of his: which seems to open an abyss or vista of infamy. The
main substance of his attack resolves itself into two propositions.
First, he asks me what right I have to talk about Spiritualism at all,
as I admit I have never been to a _seance_. This is a