Not only do we have a language of our own. We also have styles of democracy, types of education, choice of games, rules of the road that are distinctive. So pervasive is the flavour of England that we fail to notice it.
And that flavour imbues our understanding of Christianity. The hymns we sing, whether we are conformists or dissenters, shape that understanding. Charles Wesley and John Newton count for more than hymns coming from elsewhere – say Luther, Taizé or J.M. Neale – in our tribal consciousness.
The manner of our evangelization brought its own tinge. Christianity came to this country via its monarchs; the close connection that followed between monarch and bishop has equated hierarchs in all subsequent generations. It has also coloured the nature of dissent.
Language, music and government, conformity and nonconformity, we can say, have put a distinctive stamp on our interpretation of the Christian faith. Knightly orders, vestures and honorific titles have bolstered credibility in office-holders and institutions such as universities. The Crown being the source of these awards brings into play forces that are not found in nations lacking our merged pattern. Simeon and his followers brought a new emphasis on personal faith into the English character as did the puritans.
These connections make change a slow process. A top-down programme finds just as difficult to manage as a proletarian one. A Marxist approach may find itself just as much hampered as an élitist one when it is a matter of changing course in a big country.
In the Christian community music may be the solvent. The pipe-organ set the pace for centuries but pipe-organs do not come cheap. Instrumentalists in the galleries happily led the singing of the psalms with help from Tate and Brady. Then came the revolution and organs in every parish church. Today the guitar is the pace-setter. This has obliterated many distinctions and installed a new pecking-order in terms of a doctrinal menu. As Andrew Wilson-Dickson has said: ‘Amid much disposable music, some of Kendrick’s songs have an intensity of character which may make them more than merely transitory.’ English Christianity has changed and continues to do so. It is not perhaps as distinctive as it once was.
‘STAGNANT WATERS’
When Wordsworth sighed for men like Milton in our national life, he saw England as a fen of stagnant waters. It was a country that had lost its inward happiness.
Rupert Brooke, away from his native land, said he would pack ‘And get me to England once again.’
‘Oh, to be in England Now that April’s there,’ was Browning’s similar view.
Chesterton enjoyed another side of the English character: ‘The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.’
And Auden looked and wondered: ‘Only God can tell the saintly from the suburban.’
Pugin remonstrated: ‘How can you expect to convert England if you use a cope like that?’
‘There must be a place where the whole of it all comes right’ – Kit Wright
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