Religion: Death of the Dean

His eyes were like caves in his pale face, and his thin lips and thin fingers often writhed with nervous shyness when he talked. But what Britain's famed Gloomy Dean said was unshy enough to jolt generations of Britons. He approved of divorce, birth control ("We are breeding from the bottom and dying off at the top"), euthanasia, and in certain cases suicide (he thought condemned criminals, for instance, should be allowed to kill themselves as they wished). He disapproved of democracy, cosmetics, Martin Luther, Roman Catholicism and revolutionaries (whom he advocated shooting down "like mad dogs").

In his impregnable position as...

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