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. The Bishop of Llandaff had only once visited his diocese in 36 years. In England, the established church was both corrupt at its core and intellectually feeble.

In France an equally corrupt church was mocked by Voltaire and undermined intellectually by Hume, the most fashionable philosopher of his day in Paris and London. For Christians, the divinity of Christ was proved by his capacity to perform miracles and by the miracle of his own resurrection from the tomb. For Hume, miracles were outside the natural order of things. The Deists of the Enlightenment sought to reduce dogmatic Christianity to a few universal truths. ‘It might satisfy the intellect, but it failed to gladden the heart’. The Methodist John Wesley and his brother, the greatest missionaries of the age, gladdened the heart with some thousand hymns. Christ had died to save all who truly repented of their sins.