Faith under fire

Giles St Aubyn, in this long, scholarly book, sets out to chronicle the shifts in the Christian churches from the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and the Enlightenment of the 18th, to the apparent triumph of secularism in the 20th. H. H. Asquith, as leader of the Liberal party, was not an enthusiastic Christian. Nor did the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee waste much time on religious concerns, which bored him. What mattered was the NHS and the welfare state, which saved men’s bodies rather than their souls.

The Reformation had shattered the universal Catholic church of the Middle Ages, leaving in its wake what the Catholic apologist Blaise Pascal called ‘the thousand bizarre sects of Protestantism’. By the mid- 18th century the established Church of England appeared to be losing the battle for men’s souls. As Gibbon put it, the Anglican clergy remembered that they had a salary to draw but forgot that they had a duty to perform.