Anglicanism: a dialogue between present and past.

Many years ago the BBC had a short-lived fashion for 'imaginary conversations', in which historical personages who could never have met were set to explain themselves to each other - Dr Johnson and Cardinal Newman, for example. A variant of this device sticks in my mind, and I find myself facing in imagination figures from the past and telling them what they do not know, and could not have imagined, about the England of the present day, and imagining their reactions: explaining the Internet to Lord Byron, and imagining what he would think of it, is an interesting mental discipline.

One of my favourite conversationalists is King Henry VIII. There are, of course, several Henrys co-existing in the national imagination. At one level, there is the music-hall figure of fun trying desperately to make a go of marriage - any marriage - and continue his dynasty. For Catholic apologists there is the obese tyrant who for selfish reasons dragged the nation into schism and religious and emotional poverty. For rationalist historians there is the progressive administrator who founded the Royal Navy and steered a generally successful course through a period of intellectual and economic turmoil; and so on. My Henry is none of these, but two things. First, a man in two worlds, modern and medieval. His contemporaries included Copernicus, Erasmus and Leonardo, but he clanked about in armour that would not have been out of place at Agincourt. The greatest event of his life, as it turned out, was the European discovery of North America, which was made when he was a child of seven by a captain sailing under his father's patronage from an English port (Bristol): yet there is no record that Henry, keen on ships and the sea as he was, ever took the slightest interest in the New World, even when his Spanish relatives-in-law were getting, and wasting, the most stupendous fortunes ever made.

My other Henry is the man obsessed with God and his duty to God as steward of the English nation: the man who went to Mass three times a day (his record was five) and who in long exchanges with his Archbishop developed each other's ideas. It is this man, mainly, to whom I wish to explain what has become of his Church, and what is likely to become of it in the next century.

HENRY: Tell me, fellow, how fares England since my time? Do sheep still do well? Have we yet made anything of that new-found-land across the ocean? Most of all, is it a land of saints? Hath God shown us any special favour? He knoweth how I strove to set the congregation of England on the right track towards Him.

G. W.: Sire, since your time we have made vast advances in all worldly things. New discoveries and devices have rained upon us. We are richer than you can possibly imagine. The lass that serves drink in an ale-house is better dressed than any of your Queens. The poorest, that live on the public charity, eat a far better diet than your Earls. Work is infinitely lighter, and leisure and holidays are abundant. The ordinary journeyman takes his family to Greece or Spain to holiday in the sun. We live, on average, twice as long.

HENRY: Good. good. Then you have more opportunities for the service and worship of God, and fewer distractions. In my time, we offered God to the poor mainly as a consolation and an escape. Life was hard for my poor folk, and the promise of Heaven was a recompense. It must be wonderful to be free to serve God without constraint.

G.W.: Alas, Sire, England is no longer a Christian country.

HENRY: What! Do you mean that Islam has triumphed, and that the green banner flies over London? Has Canterbury Cathedral been treated like Saint Sophia and turned into a mosque? Is England ruled by a Pasha, subservient to the Sultan?

G.W.: Worse. The great majority of the English people have become stonily indifferent to religion. They neither believe in God nor disbelieve in Him. They simply do not care. It would be regarded as very poor taste to ask, as people did an hundred years ago, 'Where do you intend to spend eternity?'

HENRY: Alas, poor souls. Have your great advances in knowledge come to this?

G.W.: That is part of it. Starting about an hundred and eighty years ago, geology first suggested that the earth was much older and more mechanistic than the bible says. Then Darwin explained how the machinery of life, once begun, could easily explain all the richness and variety of living things. Latterly, cosmologists have been explaining how the universe is necessary. In an absolute vacuum at absolute zero, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would be infringed unless the Cosmos came into being - and so it did. The Cosmos is, as one theorist recently described it, 'the ultimate free lunch'. There is, as yet, no explanation of why this should be so, but no doubt they are working on that. All this is way above the heads of the mobile vulgus, except that they understand perfectly well that there is no longer anything outside spacetime, as we now refer to it, and therefore no God, no Judgment and no Life Eternal.

HENRY: Do they no longer go to church? In my day, it was a crime not to attend church weekly and on saints' days. Most of my folk went to Mass every day, and thought they could not get through the day unless they saw their Maker being made, on the altar, by the priest.

G.W.: No. The last case I can find of anyone being brought to court for non-attendance at church was a North Tawton in Devonshire in 1762, when the case was dismissed as vexatious. Of course, it remained a social obligation for much longer. A servant who was not seen in church by his master ran a risk of being dismissed well into the nineteenth century. An Archbishop of Canterbury said to Disraeli -

HENRY: Yes, yes, I know about Disraeli. He and I often...

G.W.: - said 'We have lost the working man' and Disraeli replied 'My Lord, you never had him.'

HENRY: The working man has a soul, of course. But he does not have much in the way of worldly riches. For that, the church depends, as it always has, upon the well-to-do. There was in my day a pestilent fellow, one Tyndale, who reproached the church for extortion. Very true - but of course one could not say so. The church was by far the wealthiest corporation in the land, even after I had redirected the wealth of the idle and corrupt monks into more useful channels.

G.W.: The church is still wealthy, although about ten years ago it decided to develop its property directly, instead of simply leasing it to fellows who knew what they were about. As a result, it lost a great deal of money - no more than other property companies did, but still enough to hurt. Timing is all in those matters; and to come in at the top of the market simply gives you a good view of the downward slope. A secondary factor is the age make-up of the church's labour force. Am I being too technical? No? At the end of our last great war, there was a great influx into the church of men who had seen battlefields and decided thereafter to serve God. They are now retiring in great numbers, and the church now has more pensioners than it has serving clergy. The cost is enormous. And, of course, they are married, and married men cost more than celibates.

HENRY: My dear friend and wisest counsellor, Archbishop Cranmer, was married - twice, I think. There is nothing in the apostolic constitution of the church against that. It is one of those rules introduced by an interfering Pope, Gregory VII, which I was so concerned to rebut. But there are ways of saving money.

G.W.: Indeed, there are. Ordaining women is one of them, and that is what the church has done.

HENRY: Harrumph! You expect me to be shocked. Let me tell you, I was educated for the Church, while my elder brother lived. My father had the idea that when Arthur was King, I should be Archbishop of Canterbury. I had a good grounding, and I can say that St. Paul's ideas on women are much misrepresented. At the end of Romans, he speaks of Phoebe as a 'minister of the church'. It was translators after my time who cut Phoebe down, first to a deaconess and then to a servant. It just goes to show that you should be wary of the Bible in English. But are these priestesses acceptable?

G.W.: Not everywhere, and not by everyone. Some of the priests, about 450, have gone to Rome and some say good riddance to men who could not see the necessity, let alone the rightness. Others have stayed, but made their dissent so obvious that a couple of bishops without dioceses - in partibus, in effect - have been appointed to supervise them because they would not accept the authority of their diocesan.

HENRY: Be plain, fellow. First you say that England is no longer a Christian land, but then you go on to talk about the Church as though it still lived. Which is the case?

G.W.: Both. The great majority accept a creed called humanism. This is not brutal ignorance, like that of the beasts which perish. It asks serious questions about creation, existence and final end of the Universe, and finds adequate answers without the necessity of God.

HENRY: I could tell them differently. But they would not believe, though one rose from the dead. Do you recognise that?

G.W.: Yes. But what is the chief end of Man, in such circumstances? Not 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever', as the Scots catechism has it. It is to get on with life here and now, enjoying the vast wealth and comfort that our inventions have brought us: to obey the law, lest we be punished, except when we can do it without being found out: not to hurt others lest they hurt us back, except when they are quite without means of retaliation, like small children: to be patriotic when we get some fun out of it, as at international football matches, but not to bother otherwise: and to claim all our rights while performing the least possible range of duties. Such is the philosophy of ninetenths of the English nation. Co-existent with this, there are three other elements, all of which will be familiar to anyone who knows the history of the later Roman Empire, when the Olympian deities had faded but a kind of religious sediment remained. They are, first, the worship of Luck, whom the Romans called Fortuna, with her wheel, whose rites are celebrated weekly mainly in a lottery: second, the attendance on oracles, who are now called astrologers and who tell fortunes by the stars: and third, Nature-worship of various kinds. Some of this last kind is quite intellectual, for example Professor Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Other parts are simple witchcraft. Most is harmless: some is not.

HENRY: Does God not curse such a nation?

G.W.: People say that you only have to look around to see the automatic justice of God seeping across the land like the incoming tide. I will mention only one of the symptoms: there are so many ill-conditioned and disorderly young people that anyone meeting a group of teenagers he does not know will steer clear of them. They are like your London apprentices, but spread nationwide. A nation that fears its own children is a nation far gone. Religion of various kinds - we are a very tolerant nation, the good side of our indifference - hold about one-tenth. About half of those are not Christian religions at all. You asked about Islam. We do have a small proportion of Mohammedans; every large city has a mosque. We have a similar number of Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists - unobtrusive groups, for the most part.

HENRY: And the Jews? You must have Jews, if you have these others. What are they like? I never saw a Jew, you know. They were kept out in my time.

G.W.: Oh, yes. Few in number, and getting fewer. Divided, as the Christians are, into those of the old observance and followers of a reformed Jewry. Fully Anglicised, and sharing all our defects. And that leaves the Christians.

HENRY: So there still are some! You know, I am less upset by what you tell me than you might think. If the Church and congregation of England have ceased to be useful to God, of course he will bring them to an end. The Church is only a means to an end. But, by the way, if people no longer believe in God, what do they make of the Devil?

G.W.: In the last ten years, I have been to church nearly a thousand times - many churches. I have never heard the Devil mentioned. One sometimes hears rumours of covens of Satanists, but they usually dissolve into figments of the imagination. When a church was being demolished in Leeds some years ago - for that typical modern worship-area, a motorway - upside-down crosses were painted on the walls with slogans welcoming the destruction of a church on behalf of 'Lord Satan'; but it seems to have been a single deranged individual. As the modern philosopher C. S. Lewis observed, it would be the greatest possible achievement for the Devil to make the world disbelieve in His existence.

HENRY: Where I am now, I no longer, of course, have need of the Church. I no longer have faith, I have certainty. I no longer have hope, I have knowledge. Caritas, of course remains, and I feel it towards those poor struggling folk. How many are there left?

G.W.: Your Church no longer publishes figures for attendance. They are too discouraging. About three in every hundred people go regularly. In a parish of 2,000 that means about 60. A much larger number will say they belong, when they have to fill in a form. They will expect to be married in church, and buried from there. It is still socially respectable to claim membership of the Established Church. A curious phenomenon may be observed. At Evensong - the most beautiful word in the English language, by the way - nine or ten people, mostly elderly and far from well off, will be found dotted about the nave. Sometimes a new arrival in the parish will drop in. Afterwards, he will tell his friends how gloomy and unfriendly it was, and what a feeling he had of interrupting a coterie. 'That church has fallen into the hands of a set of people I don't want to know,' he will say, But if you ask one of the nine or ten, they will say that, although it would be utterly pretentious to describe themselves as the Righteous Remnant of Israel, they are the people struggling to keep the church going in hope of better times, and how they welcome the sight of a new face.

Sometimes, in a neglected garden, one may see a patch of a ground-cover plant that has died from neglect, leaving a mat of grey vegetation covering the surface. Look more closely, and you may see young green spikes thrusting their way through and upwards. The Church of England is like that. There are many spots of new growth. London churches in Brompton and Piccadilly and others in Chorleywood and Bristol spring to mind. But there is a question. Are the green shoots growing from the old roots, or will they prove to be completely different plants which have seeded themselves among the dead herbage? Only time will show.

HENRY: What do the bishops, in such a parlous state? I gave more thought to who should be bishops than I did to anything else, and I claim to have put the ablest men in England into those palaces.

G.W.: Ah, the bishops. Certainly, we have able men. We follow a rule of three: in each diocese, we have, first, a pastor; then, a scholar; and then an administrator, to clear up the mess made by the preceding two. Some, but very few, are thinkers. Jenkins of Durham cut to the heart of Christianity and in the process dismissed all its pretty accretions as charming fables, ending by describing the Resurrection as 'a conjuring trick with bones.' Since the multitude had not been following his argument, they simply bayed for his blood - not literally, as in your day, Sire, but I expect there were those who would have liked that. Williams of Monmouth is, to my mind, the most rigorous pursuer of an argument there could possibly be. But they are few, which is an especial pity because, from the days of 'judicious Hooker' onwards, the English church has been a thinking and writing church out of all proportion to its size. Collectively, the bishops know the church is in dire trouble, but they lead it in what looks to the bystander in thrashing around.

First, they did their best to abandon the Book of Common Prayer, replacing it with a book in cardboard English. Most of the changes to familiar texts are pointless - 'a den of thieves' becomes 'a robbers' cave' - and succeed only in losing or weakening the strongly rhythmic pulse of the original. The theology is much the same, but is shaded towards the Evangelical position, weakening the church's claim to remain part of the historic Catholic tradition while being reformed. Most rank-and-file clergy are frankly abusive of the BCP as outdated, quaint, unintelligible and an obstacle to spirituality, and are unresponsive when a parishioner tells them that he finds it perfectly plain and very beautiful and that Christianity is not in fact either simple or easy. This sort of clergyman will arrive in a new parish very unsympathetic to the 'Remnant' he finds there, who have been keeping the church open, and will try something new to appeal to the young; the Archbishop of Canterbury, when a parish priest, got rid of pews to make way for liturgical dance. He dismissed the 'dear people' who objected to this with the comment that they could not hear 'God speaking to them in new ways.' Under his leadership, there is to be a new prayer-book for the Millennium; the church cannot leave well alone.

Part of the jettisoning has been the throwing over the side of Hymns Ancient and Modern. You would find the greatest change in your church to be the amount of music in it, compared to your day. The English people pray in song. Our best poets - Milton, Herbert, Cowper - wrote singable religious verse, and the nineteenth century added competent tunes, easily usable by any village choir. The replacement of this stock by modern words and tunes, in the name of appealing to young people, is a more serious loss than we yet admit.

I have already mentioned the ordination of women. The acceptance of homosexuality is spreading, and at the parish level most congregations will, after some initial nervousness, accept a gay clergyman provided that in his relationship he shows discretion and stability, just as a heterosexual clergyman should.

In 1990 the Archbishop of Canterbury launched a Decade of Evangelism. Although this has been punctuated by some well attended events, it has failed. The numerical decline goes on. He also took the opportunity of the church's financial troubles to introduce a new tight management structure, the Archbishops' Council, which is viewed with a mixture of hope and apprehension by the church at large. I should add that all these men - lay officers, parish clergy, rural deans, archdeacons, bishops and archbishops - work very hard. This filling up of the diary with meetings and engagements is all very well, but it has its sinister side; one might say there is a kind of Parkinson's Law that extreme busy-ness is a sign of an organisation in decline.

HENRY: I ran my church very well by talking to Cranmer and two or three other men. What does the Supreme Governor now do? Is she active - I believe it is a she, with the same name as my own second daughter (what a good girl she turned out to be!) - in her duties?

G.W.: Not at all. As a constitutional monarch, she can only act on the advice of her ministers. Her Government views the church with embarrassment, and wishes the Establishment would go away. The Prime Minister is a regular churchgoer and personally a good man, as you would understand that word; but he goes as readily to a Roman Catholic church, with his wife. The average politician's attitude was summed up by a senior Conservative Minister, who said 'I love to be attacked by a bishop. They are such high profile creatures, and so silly: they always get it wrong.'

HENRY: So the church is left to its own devices, is it? And are you then surprised that a mess is the result?

G.W.: Not really. But there is a great deal of personal devotion going on in the church; prayer groups and 'house churches' are only the surface. Many folk cultivate a close personal relationship with their Saviour. Bible reading and discussion go on.

HENRY: I burnt such folk. With the church's duty to teach goes its need to discipline. I would not have common people brushing and combing their pink, fluffy souls in private. Our Lord tells all His followers to join a church: it is one of his few clear instructions. Along with an injunction to attend Communion.

G.W.: Sire, your church has been, and is, lax in its attitude to Communion. It puts little stress on the need to attend regularly. This is the main reason why it lost so much ground to Rome, which has hammered home that the first duty of Christianity is to show up at the Sacrament at least once a week.

But, Sire, you would find much familiar to you. You lived in a highly, rigidly, stratified society; and the church you left is the great remaining fortress of the class system. The humble people in the parishes, who keep the show on the road by their weekly rivers, are in a different world from the smooth people who inhabit its higher reaches. They move in large, gloomy rooms, in palaces, deaneries and the offices of the Establishment, they follow the royal and aristocratic principle that grandeur is necessary, but comfort is rather common, practising the skill of putting ordinary people at their unease; and the laymen are rather better at this than the deans and bishops. It is curious to note how snobbishness can go hand in hand with rather left-wing social views.

Meanwhile, in the parishes, they think a good deal about the Kingdom of Heaven and their own personal contact with Jesus, and trust that, like the prophet Zechariah, they will be 'led out of the pit . . . O ye prisoners of hope.'

AUGUST

IN THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

* We begin a series of articles on Japan by Raymond Lamont-Brown with an account of the new spirituality by examining the growth of new religions.

* Dr Abiodun Onadipe looks at Nigeria's prospects after the recent election which saw the country restored to civilian rule after years of military dictatorship.

George Wedd, C. B., a retired civil servant, is an Anglican who worships in a village church in the diocese of Bath and Wells.