after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the
well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and
running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and
sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting;
little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an
idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say
it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but
man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are
comic--eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are
exactly the things that are most worth doing--such as making love. A man
running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a
wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat
with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard
himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no
animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that
hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the
future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground
on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants
have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the
technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree
combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they
were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting
pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were
looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in
Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be
filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected
pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment
giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry.
A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out
of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him
think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and
let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose.
Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven by their
distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no
doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and
they could not pull it ou