A Church that Was
by Peter Hitchens, First Things:
Yes, I remember the Church of England, much more than a name, a living thing. As it happens, my own religiously confused family was not churchgoing. By the early 1950s, most of the respectable English middle class had ceased to be especially religious, though they continued to respect faith. Church attendance had ceased to be normal in most of Britain around the time of the 1914–18 war, and had begun to be abnormal after the 1939–45 war. But parents brought up in the lost age of faith still felt it right that their children should be taught beliefs they themselves had lost, but be taught them by someone else.
So through various schools I was exposed to the last enchantments of Anglicanism as it once was, full of the might, majesty, dominion, and power granted to it by the first Queen Elizabeth. These men had crowned the second Elizabeth before an astonished world in 1953, and made an ordinary young woman our anointed monarch in a ceremony of grandeur, mystery, and poetry, a vast moth-eaten musical brocade that in those days still comfortingly covered up the peeling wallpaper and cracked plaster of our national home.
I spent time as a non-singing pupil at a cathedral choir school in the softest corner of Southern England, what George Orwell called the sleekest landscape in the world. The cathedral cities of England are unknown elsewhere. Other countries may have cathedrals; one thinks of Chartres, Cologne, or Milan. But they do not have these uniquely English holy places. The great church broods over the small town, once a seat of power but long overtaken in size and importance by some shapeless industrial blob nearby. There is usually an elegant close of eighteenth-century gentlemen’s houses, breathing the sweet combination of Scripture, reason, and tradition which is the whole point of the Anglican compromise. There are gardens and trees almost as ancient as the buildings. All is regulated in an unworldly rhythm by bells and choirs, matins and evensong. They are shrines to a particular view of life, thought, and death.
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