When I was studying at Oxford a couple of decades ago, I rented a car and drove to the south of England to visit Malcolm Muggeridge, who lived in Robertsbridge, and his closest friend of some six decades, the prominent Anglican cleric, Alec Vidler, who lived in Rye. (As a little boy Vidler had known Henry James, whose home, Lamb House, had stood at the end of the street.)

When Muggeridge and Vidler had met at Cambridge, Muggeridge had been an agnostic, Vidler a believer. By 1980, when I talked to them, they had swapped positions. Muggeridge, the journalist, humorist, and rake, had become devout (and would two years later become a Roman Catholic), whereas Vidler, who had been a priest in the Church of England all his life, had become a doubter.

“I once asked Alec,” Muggeridge told me with a chuckle, “how much of the Creed he believed to be literally true. Alec said he thought it more likely than not that ‘He suffered under Pontius Pilate.’”