The Death of Christian Britain

— The Problem with ‘Religious Decline’ —
Advancing fashion to the post of truth,
And centering all authority in modes
And customs of her own, till sabbath rites
Have dwindled into unrespected forms,
And knees and hassocks are well-nigh divorced.
God made the country, and man made the town. 12
Walter Scott (1771–1832) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850), poets and
novelists of enduring popularity with British people in the nineteenth
century, centred much of their idylls in rural locations where charm and
nature heightened sensibilities. Wordsworth wrote in 1805 that it was only
in nature, ‘Among the woods and mountains, where I found in thee a
gracious Guide’, that the ‘High thoughts of God and Man’ could be
‘Triumphant over all those loathsome sights/Of wretchedness and vice’ of
London. 13 Robert Southey (1774–1843), the Poet Laureate, entered the
debate over church extension in cities by the Church of England, highlighting
the breakdown of the old parish system: ‘Every parish being in
itself a little commonwealth, it is easy to conceive, that before manufactures
were introduced, or where they do not exist, a parish, where the
minister and parochial officers did their duty with activity and zeal, might
be almost as well ordered as a private family. ... [This] cannot possibly be
exercised in our huge city or manufacturing parishes.’ 14
The clergy accepted London as by its metropolitan nature to be a
‘problem’. The Congregationalist John Blackburn told a mechanics’ institute
class in the capital in 1827:
The metropolis of a great empire must necessarily be, in the present
state of human society, the focus of vice. Such was Nineveh, such
was Babylon, such was Rome – SUCH IS LONDON. Here, therefore,
is to be found in every district, the theatre, the masquerade, the
gaming-table, the brothel. Here are to be purchased, in every street,
books that . . . tend to weaken all moral restraints, and to hurry the
excited but unhappy youth who is charmed by them into the snares
of pollution, dishonesty, and ruin.
Yet, though he considered ‘the inhabitants of London be cursed with a
moral plague’, he acknowledged the capital to be well-endowed with evangelical
agencies of spiritual and moral improvement: the various bible
societies, mechanics institutes and the like. ‘The materiel of moral improvement’,
he noted, ‘is possessed here in greater abundance than in any other
spot on the earth.’ 15 But whilst London’s vice was understandable if not
excusable, that of the provincial city was not. Just as the poets eulogised
rural piety and a lost golden age, so clergy translated to urban parishes
quickly sensed the loss of the rural ecclesiastical system. The majority of
British clergy continued to come from the countryside and villages probably
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