king. There may have been other men whose life was without fear and without reproach'; but their history is unknown to us; their portrait is hardly more than a name." IV. THE SENSE OF HUMOR IN JESUS. "When a child, with child-like apprehensions that dived not beneath the surface of the matter, I read those parables not guessing the involved wisdom- I had more yearnings toward that simple architect that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbor; I grudged at the harsh censure pronounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent; and prizing their simplicity beyond the more provident, and to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine wariness of their competitors, I felt a kindness that amounted almost to a tendre for those thoughtless virgins. I have never made an acquaintance since that lasted, or a friendship that answered, with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters." · Charles Lamb. THE SENSE OF HUMOR IN JESUS. “Amid the sorrow, disappointment, agony, and anguish of the world, — our dark thoughts and tempestuous passions, the gloomy exaggerations of self will, the enfeebling illusions of melancholy, - wit and humor, light and lightning, shed their soft radiance and dart their electric flash."-Whipple. "How curious it is," says the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, "that we always consider solemnity, and the absence of all gay surprises and encounters of wits, as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call blessed! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances." Rather than believe in the "smileless eternity" of such as these, we should accept the conjecture of Soame Jennings, that "a portion of the happiness of seraphim and just men made perfect would be derived from an exquisite perception of the ludicrous." To that school of melancholy teachers who frown upon all pleasantry, and buttress their gloomy position with the assertion. that Jesus wept but never smiled," the title of this chapter will be particularly offensive. It will strike them as downright blasphemy to intimate that Jesus possessed and used the sense of humor so common to mankind. We assuredly appreciate the delicacy of the position, and shall endeavor to avoid, in our treatment of this subject, anything that might wound the most sensitive soul. There are several considerations that will pave the way. We take it for granted that Jesus was a complete human being, and that as such a being he must have had all the human attributes and faculties, the faculty of mirthfulness among them. a man, and lacked nothing that pertains to men. Then, too, had he been without the sense of humor, much in the lives and characters of those with whom he had to deal, he never could have understood and He was |