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 th