'There has been an event lurking in the background of our life - intensely interesting but unimportant to us personally - the break up of the Christian church in Great Britain. The rejection of the revised Prayer Book by Parliament and the consequently unseemly controversy which has raged among the ecclesiastics - the revelation of an indifferent and almost scornful public opinion - has awakened the English public to the fact that the English are no longer Christians in any real sense of the word. No one troubles to assert this fact, and no one denies it. What is becoming near a public scandal is the paucity of candidates alike for the Anglican priesthood and for the Free Church ministry. Meanwhile Dean Inge openly advises in the pages of a profane journal, that no candidate for order now believes in the supernatural element of the Christian faith....How long this queer state of mind, the Church, with its creed and its rites, its pomps and its ceremonies, can continue part of the British Constitution is difficult to foretell!'
Beatrice Webb, Diary Entry for 2nd May 1928 in Ruth Winstone (Ed.), Events, Dear Boy, Events: A Political Diary of Britain from Woolf to Campbell, p.29.
