This I Believe

What I believe makes a sort of signpost on the road joining my knowledge, which is very small, and my ignorance, which is very large. The night is too dark for me to read what it says, but I can just see dimly that there is a signpost, and this is comforting. And perhaps sometime I shall be able to read what it says.

In the language I use, there are words like “God,” “destiny,” “immortality,” “fate,” “soul,” “spirit,” “luck,” and others I’d find it hard to define. But I would so often be helpless to convey what I mean without these words, that it seems to me I cannot gain say, or repudiate, the ideas they represent. They’ve established squatter’s rights, at least in my mind, and all the arguments I have with myself would be pretty glum and empty without them.

I don’t know whether this gives me what many people would call a belief in a Supreme Being, or in a future life. But if I had to answer the question in those terms, I would say that it does. I certainly cannot believe that death is a total end of everything; that life—which must have come from somewhere—is to go nowhere. So I believe that death will be worth dying, just as I have found life worth living.

Because I was born in one of the countries of western civilization, I would be, in a sense, a Christian, even if I claimed not to be one, because the Christian ethic has been in the moral air I have breathed, and the structure of Christendom part of my spiritual inheritance. One can no more change that sort of thing than one can change climate; nor would I, if I could. I find now, as I get older, that the climate has prevailed over a lot of rough weather at various times, and that moral values have inched their way to the top of the heap in my own personal reckonings.

As for spiritual values, there are moments when insight supersedes logic, and I can believe that the soul must exist if only because it wants to—if it wants too, enough. But the soul to me is not a segregation, nor a seal of approval, or a privileged passport across a frontier. When I look at my dog, whose motives and intentions are in so many ways purer than my own, I am as proud of the category of life that includes us both as I am of my race, which happens to be the human race.

I believe in my fellow man, in my obligation to respect him as him, and not as a unit of them, or even of us, and to accept him as a neighbor who has as much right to enjoy life as I have. And since my own tastes are not everybody’s, I must tolerate differences of behavior. And since many of my opinions may be wrong, I believe in the value of saying perhaps and probably, very often—but not quite always. Of some ultimate certainty of which life and death are part, I feel as I have sometimes felt on reaching a mountain peak after hard climbing, a moment when one has neither breath nor skill for eloquence, but when silence itself can say yes better than words.