The aim of the John Bull Tracts is to provide simple explanations of Church Teaching for simple people. It is very important that we should understand our religion well, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of other people too. Ignorance about religion is. very widespread and you will constantly find that people are kept “back from accepting the Faith, not by what the Church teaches, but by what they think she teaches. If we are well-instructed we can be of great use in removing prejudice and misunderstanding; a few words of courteous explanation will often do a great deal of good.

One of the chief reasons why there is so much ignorance about religion is the popular idea that a right belief about God is not very important, and that it doesn’t much matter what a man believes so long as he believes it sincerely. “Let the Churches quarrel about their dogmas,” says the ordinary man; “dogma has very little interest for me. After all, there are good men in every denomination; we are all out for the same thing. And so far as I can see, if only a man is sincere, it makes very little difference what he believes.”

There is just enough truth in this phrase to make it acceptable, and so it has come to be a proverb. And proverbs have great influence; they [1/2] go everywhere preaching to everyone, and they are remembered much more easily than sermons. A proverb is like the little girl in the nursery rhyme; if it is good, it is very very good, and if it is bad, it is horrid. And a proverb is very difficult to destroy. You bring out your great argument to attack it, and it is gone before you can bring your argument to bear on it. An argument attacking a proverb is like a fifteen-inch gun fired at a mosquito. Yet an evil proverb, like a mosquito, can work great mischief; it can induce a malaria of the soul, and for the sake of man’s spiritual health its destruction becomes a matter of great importance.

Now, when it is said that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he is sincere, if what is meant is that conduct is the test of true religion, why, then, of course, a real truth is expressed. If a man is a good man, however wrong his beliefs may be, however strange it may seem that such a creed should have such a disciple, however far he may be from the results which generally follow the teaching of such things as he believes, his goodness must, be acknowledged in. spite of his beliefs. “By their fruits,” said our” Saviour, “ye shall know them.” But, as a rule, this proverb does not mean sincerity of life, but sincerity of belief. It means that it does not matter what a man believes, since one kind of belief is just as likely to issue in good living as another. It means in effect that Catholicism and Protestantism, Unitarianism and Christianity, Churchmanship and Dissent, are equally good [2/3] forms of religion, and that as regards their practical effect on a man’s life and conduct, there is little or nothing to choose between them.

That is the popular view. It sounds very broad-minded and tolerant, and I dare say at first hearing you might be disposed to agree with it. “After all,” I can imagine someone saying, “is it worth while insisting so strongly on our own particular beliefs, and trying to convert other people to them? Protestantism suits one type of mind; Catholicism suits another type of mind.” Or, to go even further, “Christianity suits, the West, Buddhism and Mohammedanism suit the East. And there are good men in all religions. I really can’t help feeling that the proverb is true, and that it doesn’t matter what a man believes, so long as he believes it sincerely.”

Perhaps you feel that. If so, I want to try and show you that it is a very dangerous mistake; and I can perhaps best do that by reminding you that you would not be prepared to apply it to anything else except religion.

For instance, does it matter what you believe about material things? Would it make any difference to a motor car if the engineer thought that lead was as good a material for bearings as steel? Or that a triangle was as good a. shape for a wheel as a circle? Does the value of the car he builds depend upon sincere believing or correct believing? Supposing some lunatic should believe sincerely that the proper way to drive through a crowded street was to put the accelerator down hard and go ahead at sixty miles an hour, would [3/4] his sincerity keep him out of the police-court? In all material things, the more sincere you are, if you are right, the better; but the more sincere you are, if you are wrong, the worse.

Does it matter what you believe about the multiplication-table? As little children we were taught that twice two make four, and we were corrected if we said they made five, however sincerely we believed it. Why? Because a correct belief about arithmetic is necessary to human society. You are very free and independent, and you love to sing “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.” Yet you are a slave all the time to ideas and standards which you share with your fellow-Britons. Perhaps you approve of undenominational religion; do you approve of undenominational finance? Are you tolerant enough to tolerate a financial heretic who says that nineteen shillings make a pound? Not if I know you! You would let him say it, but you won’t let him pay it, unless it be in the bankruptcy court.

And how about medicine? Does it matter what the chemist believes so long as he is sincere? Will it be any consolation to your widow that he honestly thought the bottle contained digestive tablets, when in reality they were tabloids of morphia? And what about travelling? The train went at 2.15, but you honestly thought it was at 2.30, and so, of course, you missed it. You said to the porter, “I was quite sure it went at 2.30.” And what did he reply? “You should look at the time-table.” In other words, you should verify [4/5] your beliefs. Right action does not merely depend on sincere belief, but on correct belief.

I have purposely taken silly examples because they make the truth so much more interesting and easy to understand. Let me give just one other illustration, this time of a very serious kind. Two great wars were caused because a whole nation believed a false creed sincerely enough to put it into practice. Germany believed that might was right, and that war was a necessity of her national development. As a result she plunged the world into a terrible catastrophe. To-day it is not too much to say that the future of mankind depends upon whether the nations are going to believe that war is inevitable, or that Christ’s great doctrine of the brotherhood of man is the only true basis for their relations with one another. Here we can see clearly that everything matters what is believed, for belief is the sure pathway to action. Believe in a falsehood, and all life becomes false. Believe in the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Thus in manufacture, in business, in medicine, in politics, men are bound to believe, not only sincerely, but correctly. Does it not seem reasonable that the same law should apply in the things of the soul? In religion indeed, more than in any other department of life, right belief leads to right action, and wrong belief leads to wrong action. For example, the Calvinistic belief that the vast majority of men are by God’s decree condemned to suffer for ever the torments of hell, has, as a matter of history, had terrible results; it has led to [5/6] self-righteousness, tyranny, cruelty, and contempt. The Unitarian belief that Jesus is only a good man has removed God from his creation, stopped missionary effort, and hindered the growth of fellowship in religion. The Protestant belief that preaching is more important than the Sacraments, and that the Blessed Eucharist is nothing but bread and wine, has practically destroyed the idea of worship among English people, paralysed their devotion, closed their churches, except on Sundays, substituted self for brotherhood in the service of Christ, and weakened, almost to a point of disappearance, the whole idea of Church membership. It is, of course, true that many Calvinists and Unitarians and other Protestants are men of most holy lives, and dispositions, who put us to shame by the example of their deep devotion to Jesus. There are thousands of people who are better than their creeds, just as there are thousands of people who are worse. But such people are no true exponents of the principles they hold; they are exceptions to the ordinary results of those principles. In general, it remains true that errors in belief lead to errors in conduct, and that if you want to live right you must believe right.

This does not, of course, mean that we should be intolerant. We who believe in the Catholic religion should be false to its whole spirit if we were to imagine that we could serve it by striking a harsh and intolerant note, or by asserting that no one can be saved who does not believe exactly what, we believe. The more we believe in our own Faith, the less we can deny to other faiths [6/7] their measure of truth and beauty and power. There is a light of God which is given to all men, and a work of God in all the religions of the world. But we are persuaded that the Catholic religion is the true religion of Jesus, that without it life goes astray in a thousand ways, that it has a profound influence on practical life and conduct, and that it helps a man, as no other religion can, to be a better worker, a better citizen, a better friend, a better child of God. We believe that in its great doctrines of the Incarnation, the Cross, the Church, the Sacraments, the Real Presence, and in the Catholic life of worship and service, there is the only complete answer to what the souls of men are reaching out to attain. That is the great conviction which urges us forward on our campaign for the conversion of England. And only in so far as we believe that our holy Faith is not merely the best among a number of competing religions, but the true religion, the ultimate religion, the revealed religion of Jesus Christ, can we have a real hope of commending it to our fellow-men, and making it once more the religion of the English-speaking race.