PERCENTAGE OF CHURCHGOERS
SIR,—Your correspondents who hav written on the subject of the numbers of adherents to the Churches in this country omit, I venture to say, an important factor.
Allow me to present my case. Like all my relatives that ever I heard of I was baptised and confirmed into the Church of England, and all of us expect, in due time, to be married and ouried according to its rites. Some of my family are better churchmen than I, and I respect them for it, am even perhaps a little envious For my part I often intend to go to church and succeed in getting thete a dozen times a year, when I enjoy and believe myself to be edified by the old liturgy, especially the Psalms, Lessons and Collects which high-falutin' parsons gabble and mutilate. I hate parsons' antics, high or low church.
I don't communicate. However I approach the Altar I find myself involved in dogmas that I distrust, and obliged to make professions which for me are insincere. I believe there are mililons like me. To be honest I should admit that I am much more an Anglican churchman than I am an orthodox Christian.
In our village in Cambridgeshire before the war, there were 18o in- habitants and only one family not described as " C. of E." in the census paper. Of this iflo a dozen were communicants, the average Sunday morning congregation was 3o, but at harvest festival the church was crowded with every able-bodied man and woman in the village, lustily singing harvest hymns. That was a simple instance, but in a less emphatic degree such circumstances are to be found even among deracinated suburbans. Are all we casuals to be written off as heathens? Perhaps, if the stricter sect will have it so. But we will not submit to be classed as neutral when it comes to a count of heads for and against the Church of England. Mostly we belong to the inarticulate classes who respond un- sympathetically to the impertinent quizzings of the Gallups and the Harris- sons; we don't get into the count or we get counted -Tong.
Naturally I don't much like auricular confession, especially as the Buchmanites practise it, in public, and therefore subscribe myself, Sir,
Previous page
