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 be said about it. They must avoid
uneasiness, for such great graces as theirs can grow only in calmness
and tranquillity."

This is irony rather than humour, but it implies a capacity to see
the tragi-comedy of the world, without necessarily losing the power
of enthusiasm. It also explains why Father Faber regarded an honest
sense of the ridiculous as a help to goodness. The man or woman who
is impervious to the absurd cannot well be stripped of self-delusion.
For him, for her, there is no shaft which wounds. The admirable advice
of Thomas a Kempis to keep away from people whom we desire to please,