Faith and language …

… Breviary notes : Essays in Idleness.

To appreciate the words that held the Anglican Church together, so that when they were withdrawn that church fell apart, would require great leisure. For our English-speaking world since Shakespeare, they have provided the principal cultural glue. Not only through Anglican but through Methodist and other church services, they transmitted Christianity through twenty generations. Memorable phrasing guides the mind, for the worse, but also incomparably for the better.