This I Believe

It would be easy to say, “Look up the Nicene Creed,” and leave it at that, but not helpful. To fulfill the purposes of this broadcast, it is at least necessary that I should make some attempt to explain how I came to this belief and why I continue to accept it.

First, I was brought up in the faith of the Church of England, against which, at various periods, I have, quite naturally, reacted strongly, but to which I’ve always returned. It was, I think, Reynaud, who stated that “contrary to the popular belief, very few people are sufficiently well equipped intellectually to justify their agnosticism,” and I had never been so foolish as to number myself among them. Certain of the church’s doctrines, which to others are stumbling blocks, do not appear difficult to me. In the middle of the twentieth century after Christ, it surely requires a far greater act of faith to believe in progress than to accept the dogma of original sin.

I am no mystic and indeed temperamentally opposed to all manifestations of mysticism. Skeptical by nature, my faith, such as it is, is a product of my skepticism. When I am constantly being presented with what I am sure are scientific facts, which I am incapable of disputing—in which I am asked to accept on the authority of specialists, whose judgment outside their own sphere frequently strikes me as inept—why should I question the incarnation?

The basic fact of human existence is, surely, isolation. Each of us, locked up in our private, air-conditioned watchtower of nerves and self-interest, is striving desperately to communicate. Occasionally art or love provides a wavelength on which some jumbled and never-fully-comprehended signal gets through. The belief that God Himself was once, of his own free will, so incarcerated, provides the hope that release may come.

As to the result of my acceptance of the Christian faith, I feel that certain of my deepest convictions are justified beliefs and not just prejudices; that while the means may frequently transform the end, the end can never in any circumstances justify the means; that all human institutions exist for the benefit of the individual and not the other way around; that human personality is always and everywhere sacred.

But because one proclaims a faith, it does not mean that it always burns with a steady, unvarying flame. Often, too often, it is quenched not only by public calamity or private sorrow but, even so flickering as the jet, by a disordered liver or irrational fears. Then all I can do is to remind myself that the Church does not consider giving way to depression—for such I take to be the meaning of accident—to be an inevitable misfortune, but a sin to be fought, and repeat, once more, the words of one of the greatest churchmen these Islands have ever produced, Dean Jonathan Swift: “I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which He had parted in me, if I take care to conceal these doubts from others, if I use my best endeavors to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life.”