"I don't think there is a single word in the English language," said Father
Payne, "which is responsible for such unhappiness as the word 'believe.' It
is used with a dozen shades of intensity by people; and yet it is the one
word which is always being used in theological argument, and which, like
the ungodly, 'is a sword of thine.'"
"I always mean the same thing by it, I believe!" I said.
"Excuse me," said Father Payne, "but if you will take observations of your
talk, you will find you do not. At any rate, _I_ do not, and I am more
careful about the words I use than many people. If I have a heated argument
with a man, and think he takes up a perverse or eccentric opinion, I am
quite capable of saying of him, 'I believe he must be crazy.' Now such a
sentence to a foreigner would carry the evidence of a deep and clear
conviction; but, as I say it, it doesn't really express the faintest
suspicion of my opponent's sanity--it means little more than that I don't
agree with him; and yet when I say, 'If there is one thing that I do
believe, it is in the actual existence of evil,' it means a slowly
accumulated and almost unalterable opinion. In the Creed, one uses the word
'believe' as the nearest that conviction can come to knowledge, short of
indisputable evidence; and some people go further still, and use it as if
it meant an almost higher sort of knowledge. The real meaning is just what
Tennyson said,
"'Believing where we cannot prove,'
where it signifies a conviction which we cannot actually test, but on which
we are content to act."
"But," I said, "if I say to a friend--'You are a real sceptic--you seem to
me to believe nothing,' I mean to imply something almost cynical."
"Yes," said Father Payne, "you mean that he has no enthusiasm or ideals,
and holds nothing sacred, because those are just the convictions which
cannot be proved."
"Some people," I said, "seem to me simply to mean by the word 'believe'
that they hold an opinion in such a way that they would be upset if it
turned out to be untrue."
"Yes," said Father Payne, "it is the intrusion of the nasty personal
element which spoils the word. Belief ought to be a very impersonal thing.
It ought simply to mean a convergence of your own experience on a certain
result; but most people are quite as much annoyed at your disbelieving a
thing which they _believe_, as at your disbelieving a thing which they
_know_. You ought never to be annoyed at people not accepting your
conclusions, and still less when your conclusion is partly intuition, and
does not depend upon evidence. This is the sort of scale I have in my
mind--'practically certain, probable, possible, unproved, unprovable.' Now,
I am so far sceptical that, apart from practical certainties, which are
just the convergence of all normal experience, the fact that any one person
or any number of persons believed a thing would not affect my own faith in
it, unless I felt sure that the people who believed it were fully as
sceptical as and more clear-headed than myself, and had really gone into
the evidence. But even so, as I said, the things most worth believing are
the things that can't be proved by any evidence."
"What sort of things do you mean?" I said.
"Well, a thing like the existence of God," said Father Payne; "that at best
is only a generalisation from an immense range of facts, and a special
interpretation of them. But the amazing thing in the world is the vast
number of people who are content to believe important things on hearsay,
because, on the whole, they love or trust the people who teach them. The
word 'believing,' when I use it, doesn't mean that a good man says it, and
that I can't disprove it, but a sort of vital assent, so that I can act
upon the belief almost as if I knew it. It means for me some sort of
personal experience, I could not love or hate a man on hearsay, just
because people whom I loved or trusted said that they either loved or hated
him. I might be so far biassed that I should meet him expecting to find him
either lovable or hateful, but I could not adopt a personal emotion on
hearsay--that must be the result of a personal experience; and yet the
adoption of a personal emotion on hearsay is just what most people seem to
me to be able to do. I might believe that a man had done good or bad things
on hearsay: but I could have no feeling about him unless I had seen him. I
could not either love or hate a historical personage: the most I could do
would be to like or dislike all stories told about him so much that I could
wish to have met him or not to have met him."
"Isn't it a question of imagination?" I said.
"Yes," said Father Payne, "and most ordinary religious belief is simply an
imaginative personification: but that is a childish affair, not a
reasonable affair: and that is why most religious teachers praise what they
call a childlike faith, but what is really a childish faith. I don't
honestly think that our religious beliefs ought to be a dog-like kind of
fidelity, unresentful, unquestioning, undignified confidence. The love of
Bill Sikes' terrier for Bill Sikes doesn't make Bill Sikes an admirable or
lovable man: it only proves his terrier a credulous terrier. The only
reason why we admire such a faith is because it is pleasant and convenient
to be blindly trusted, and to feel that we can behave as badly as we like
without alienating that sort of trust. I have sometimes thought that the
deepest anguish of God must lie in His being loved and trusted by people to
whom He has been unable so far to show Himself a loving and careful Father.
I don't believe God can wish us to love Him in an unreasonable way--I mean
by simply overlooking the bad side of things. A man, let us say, with some
hideous inherited disease or vice ought not to love God, unless he can be
sure that God has not made him the helpless victim of disease or vice."
"But may the victim not have a faith in God through and in spite of a
disease or a vice?" I said.
"Yes, if he really faces the fact of the evil," said Father Payne; "but he
must not believe in a muddled sort of way, with a sort of abject timidity,
that God may have brought about his weakness or his degradation. He ought
to be quite clear that God wishes him to be free and happy and strong, and
grieves, like Himself, over the miserable limitation. He must have no sort
of doubt that God wishes him to be healthy or clean-minded. Then he can
pray, he can strive for patience, he can fight his fault: he can't do it,
if he really thinks that God allowed him to be born with this horror in his
blood. If God could have avoided evil--I don't mean the sharp sorrows and
trials which have a noble thing behind them, but the ailments of body or
soul that simply debase and degrade--if He could have done without evil,
but let it creep in, then it seems to me a hopeless business, trying to
believe in God's power or His goodness. I believe in the reality of evil,
and I believe too in God with all my heart and soul. But I stand with God
against evil: I don't stand facing God, and not knowing on which side He is
fighting. Everything may not be evil which I think evil: but there are some
sorts of evil--cruelty, selfish lust, spite, hatred, which I believe that
God detests as much as and far more than I detest them. That is what I mean
by a belief, a conviction which I cannot prove, but on which I can and do
act."
"But am I justified in not sharing that belief?" I said.
"Yes," said Father Payne; "if you, in the light of your experience, think
otherwise, you need not believe it--you cannot believe it! But it is the
only interpretation of the facts which sets me free to love God, which I do
not only with heart and soul, but with mind and strength. If I could
believe that God had ever tampered with what I feel to be evil, ever
permitted it to exist, ever condoned it, I could fear Him--I should fear
Him with a ghastly fear--but I could not believe in Him, or love Him as I
do."
L