“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.