The London Spectator does not, incredibly, allow access to its web site these days even to subscribers (like me) of its print edition unless they pay an extra charge, and that’s a shame because it means that Matthew Parris’ brilliant – and curiously moving – article on the Church of England won’t get the readership it deserves.

It’s never easy to explain the traditional English attitude to religion (which used to find many an echo over here too) to those outside Albion, but Parris (an atheist, as it happens) does as well as I’ve ever seen:

“The Established Church…understood in her bones two great truths: the English are wary about religion; but the English do not want to be atheists. To the English mind, atheism itself carries an unpleasant whiff of enthusiasm. To the English mind, the universe is a very mysterious thing and should be allowed to remain so. And so the English church became what up to our own day it has always remained: a God-fearing receptacle for intelligent doubt; the marrying of a quietist belief in order, duty, decency and the evident difference between right and wrong with a shrewd suspicion that anyone who thinks he can be sure of more than that is probably dangerous…That right at the center of [English] national life, should for so long have stood this great and lovely edifice of sort-of religion, adorned (through her buildings, her rituals, her art and her music) with so much beauty, so much grace and so much balm for troubled spirits, and served in her priesthood by so many luminously decent men, has surely for centuries helped confound atheism on the one hand, and serious religious enthusiasm on the other. Not so much religious belief as religious relief, this has calmed everybody down. “You really don’t need to decide,” has been Anglicanism’s refrain, “and besides, who knows?”

Amen