OF BELIEF

“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.”