; why is it that he is not quite as certain of my
mental responsibility as I am of his mental responsibility? If we
attempt to answer the question directly and well, we shall, I think,
have come to the root of the matter by the shortest cut.

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr.
McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the
opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a
man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a
stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of
moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and
self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long
sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses
to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his
gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he
preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny
in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of
whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe
would not maintain that the more funny "Gulliver" is in its method the
less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said,
that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have
nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable
than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr.
George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not
funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.

In short, Mr. McCabe is under the influence of a primary fallacy which
I have found very common in men of the clerical type. Numbers of
clergymen have from time to time reproached me for making jokes about
religion; and they have almost always invoked the authority of that
very sensible commandment which says, "Thou shalt not take the name of
the Lord thy God in vain." Of course, I pointed out that I was not in
any conceivable sense taking the name in vain. To take a thing and
make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. It is, on the
contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object. To use
a thing in vain means to use it without use. But a joke may be
exceedingly useful; it may contain the whole earthly sense, not to
mention the whole heavenly sense, of a situation. And those who find
in the Bible the commandment can find in