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Such measures may help the Church of England gird for spiritual battle—and it must. "It's not a question of the Anglican Church's losing ground," says the Rt. Rev. Edward Ralph Wickham, Suffragan Bishop of Middleton. "We've already lost it." Of 27 million Englishmen baptized in the church, only 3,000,000 receive Communion even once a year, and cathedral deans hollowly conduct their stately services before a silent few.*
The Church of England in the 18th century has been justly described as "the Tory Party at prayer"; clerics still sigh over the Anglican failure to preach effectively to the city workers of the Industrial Revolution. Now even its impact on members of the Establishment seems minimal. The upright men among England's Top People live morally because a gentleman should do so, and not, so it seems, because the church tells them to. And among the passionate playboys of Mayfair—as the Profumo case suggests—a mention of the ethical teachings of the Church of England would seem an astonishing irrelevancy.
Archbishop Ramsey argues that "there are plenty of people in the country who are determined to go on making a fight for right moral standards, and these recent troubles have stirred us to do it." Many of England's clergymen seem to have a more flexible attitude toward the fight than the archbishop does. Almost every week London's press can headline the words of an Anglican cleric seeking to make his faith "relevant" to modern life, who jovially expresses toleration for homosexuality, divorce or adultery. An Anglican bishop recently suggested that "we stop using the word God at all for a generation." It is perhaps a consequence of such seeming weakness that except for weddings, christenings and burials, even fashionable London churches are almost as empty on Sundays as the 8,000 country churches left over from the Middle Ages.
Bishops & Butterflies. Along with Commonwealth and Crown, the Church of England thus seems to have become a relic of history, unsure of itself and its future. Says Yorkshire Novelist John (Room at the Top) Braine: "The church needs to make up its mind. Its trouble stems from the fact that nobody seems to know exactly what it stands for." The vacillations of modern-minded Anglican theologians and moralists are a prime target of satire—as witness Punch's recent capsule description of a fictional "Bishop of Bulwark": "Advanced churchman. Believes the word 'not' to be an interpolation in several commandments. Makes Marxist speeches in Lords. Dislikes being called a Christian. Collects butterflies."
Like Spanish or Italian Catholicism, the Church of England may have been lured into slumber by the comforts of establishment, but it is still nonetheless an ineradicable part of the landscape: England without its "C. of E." is as unthinkable as Rome without a Pope. Seldom as Anglicans attend church services, they proudly troop through their historic cathedrals and abbeys on vacations and holidays, and the dazzling new cathedral at Coventry is one of the nation's best-attended show places.