Stanley, that’s an interesting series of articles from the old country. The one by Niall Ferguson is a muddle, though. Contrary to what he claims, most Brits are not “atheists” (that is, after all, an act of conscious faith), but simply indifferent to religious matters. There are more important things to think about.

The most striking statistic he mentions is that in the first half of the Twentieth Century, 94% of Brits did not attend communion on the holiest day (Easter) of the church year. That’s hardly the behavior of a pious nation.

What has happened, alas, is that the state church, the C of E, lost the self-confidence to pass on the honest virtues, straightforward patriotism and rich cultural tradition that it once represented. Who did what two thousand years ago was a secondary matter. Was that intellectually incoherent? Sure. But it worked.