The laughter that makes us objective towards our limitations and yet confident of our powers is not the same as the laughter of Lazarus in Eugene O’Neill’s play. The point that Lazarus strives and strives to make convincing is that selfhood is really insignificant and that lightsome laughter is the appropriate mood for dealing with this fact. As the drama was staged--magnificently staged--at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, the laughter that Lazarus evoked in others was not lightsome. Even his own “followers” did not attain to happy humor, and the masks that they wore expressed abandon without the salt of thought. _Thinking laughter_ was reserved for Lazarus alone, but his philosophy and his laugh never, in fact, blended with each other. In spite of the fact that he applied hope-bearing terms such as “life” and “God” to the lifeless and undivine dust into which we are to be resolved, he could not make laughter really natural and free in the contemplation of such a destiny; it was, instead, an irruption suggestive of a pathological condition. The kind of lightsomeness that releases the bound self is the kind that expresses belief in the significance of selfhood. Its function is, not to solve our problems, but to take the stiffness out of the joints of our mind. The main work has still to be done by rigorous thinking and--as I have more than once hinted--by vigorous repenting. In some situations repenting is the only way in which straight thinking can perform its functions. By repentance I mean the frank, unequivocal realization and acknowledgment (to oneself at least) that one has been in the wrong in a sense so deep that the self expressed therein must be disavowed, together with the positive espousal of a contrary selfhood. In any such reversal of self there will be emotion, but not necessarily any standard emotion. Upon this point there is much misunderstanding and unfinished thinking. The most common view of repentance is that it is the climax of chagrin, a humiliating experience, or even a grovelling of spirit that anyone who respects himself would shun if he could. This notion arose, no doubt, through the grovelling of “subjects” before a human “sovereign” whom they had offended. Then, the qualities of a human sovereign having been ascribed to God, religion made of repentance the abject thing of our tradition. The ability to repent is one of the noblest attributes of man. The act is a privilege, not a dour necessity. It is, or can be, free growth from within, a normal event in rational living on the part of finite beings; therefore to be expected, provided for in our life-policies, and lived through in dignity rather than abjectness.