10 DECEMBER 1954, Page 20

CHURCH OF GREAT BRITAIN?

SIR,—Mr. Beljeman's piece of special pleading in regard to religious broadcasting struck me as singularly 'unconvincing.

'The Church of England is the Church of this country.' What country ? Not Scotland, where the Church of Scotland as by law established is Presbyterian. and Anglican dissenters form a Small minority. Not Wales and not Ireland where the Episcopal Church has for long been disestablished and is in a minority. It is, of course, the established Church of England, although statistics scent to show that practising Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters far outnumber practising Anglicans.

I could only take Mr. Betjeman's rather odd paragraph to mean that the head of all the