An English lady Catholic theologian, a convert from the C of E, once forced me to read John Robinson’s Honest to God, saying it was the book that ended Anglicanism over there. The English clergy read it, she said, and they all abandoned the faith.
After reading the thing I found her story despiriting beyond words. It was as if the Royal Shakespeare Company had given up Shakespeare after getting tellies and watching the soaps. Was there really so little there that a middlebrow lightweight like Robinson could have such an effect?
I was reminded of the incident by a blog entry elsewhere that has a very long extract dealing with the intellectual stature of Anglicanism in earlier times. England was once a great country, and even English religion was once great. Who can take England seriously today in any respect?
A very good question.
My apologies to your Anglican readers, but my observation of the general trend in conversions is for the C of E to get the Roman Church’s worst, and for the Roman Church to get their best. This ties in neatly, I think, with your post immediately prior. The relegation of the Church IN England to the status of the Church OF England permanently robbed it of any serious claim to transcendent truth. Over the long run, this can only mean that it has been robbed of its status as a religion.
To take religion as genuinely authoritative, rather than merely instrumental, is to the English mind evidence of nothing so much as a retrograde unrealism. They pride themselve immensely on this bold accomplishment—the explicit subservience of holy church to profane scepter. An arrangement so monstrous, and yet so delighted in, can only evince a pride of abominable proportions.
And Ireland?
and land from professed wisemen and people considerated saints only by superstitous peasants are best?