Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Outline of the problem
- Part II Disclosures of decline
- 3 The ‘soul of England’ in an ‘age of disintegration’: Dean Inge and the ‘trial of the churches’ in the wake of World War I
- 4 The strange death of puritan England
- 5 Social science and the discovery of a ‘post-protestant people’: Rowntree's surveys of York and their other legacy
- Part III Resistance, revival and resignation
- Conclusion: the passing of protestant England
- Index
- References
3 - The ‘soul of England’ in an ‘age of disintegration’: Dean Inge and the ‘trial of the churches’ in the wake of World War I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Outline of the problem
- Part II Disclosures of decline
- 3 The ‘soul of England’ in an ‘age of disintegration’: Dean Inge and the ‘trial of the churches’ in the wake of World War I
- 4 The strange death of puritan England
- 5 Social science and the discovery of a ‘post-protestant people’: Rowntree's surveys of York and their other legacy
- Part III Resistance, revival and resignation
- Conclusion: the passing of protestant England
- Index
- References
Summary
In the late summer of 1926 William Ralph Inge, sometime Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, long-standing Dean of St Paul's cathedral and recent recruit to the staff of the London Evening Standard, published a new book. It was his seventh in as many years. Unlike much of this prolific churchman's previous literary output, England had been specially commissioned as part of a major series. That multi-volume project, prestigiously edited by the Rt Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, was portentously dedicated to the analysis of ‘Historical Forces in the Modern World’. It was conceived as a collection of discrete studies comprehending all the significant ancient, modern and putative nations. The announced aim of so much coordinated effort was to furnish intelligent lay readers with a truly
balanced survey [replete] with such historical illustrations as are necessary, of the tendencies and forces, political, economic and intellectual, which are moulding the lives of contemporary states.
But its underlying purpose pointed to nothing less than the pursuit of world peace. By that, Fisher and his associates meant Pax Britannica tempered by the League of Nations. The Warden fervently believed that a hitherto elusive goal might be achieved through enhanced mutual understanding, at least insofar as the best and the brightest in the anglophone world then conceived of that state. Inge's offering was one of the first volumes to appear, followed shortly after complementary accounts of Germany by G. P. Gooch, and Turkey by Arnold Toynbee.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Passing of Protestant EnglandSecularisation and Social Change, c.1920–1960, pp. 95 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010