e 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 th