THAT is W. H. Auden's comment on those policies and trends which threaten to depose the Authorised Version and the Book of Common Prayer. Meanwhile, too many churchmen and teachers stand around with upturned palms. Some seem unaware of what such a loss implies. Others do not see that unless certain policies are reversed both Cranmer and the Authorised Version will be out of mind by the year 2000. By then it will be no use intoning 'Of course, we all love the English liturgy and the King James Bible'. Next to nobody will have had the opportunity to hear or to know either. The old books will be gently falling apart on the vestry shelves.

We speak strongly because the alternatives are stark. Either the Church wills the conditions under which Cranmer and King James continue to be part of the natural furniture of the mind, or else they drag out a shifty afterlife amongst an eight o'clock or mid-week remnant. Indeed some parishes have already blotted them out altogether. Behind the thin guise of 'choice' the double crown of English faith and language is being hustled and shoved into the museum. And what loosens the keystone of these classic texts touches the whole arch of rhyme and imaginative reason. The common poetry of English life is now being abandoned, in church and in school. This will be a national loss comparable to the wholesale destruction of our churches and cathedrals. Where the markers stood, there will be gaping holes filled by utilitarian disposables. Vast tracts of feeling and reference will be obliterated. Not merely will some fifty pages of the Oxford Book of Quotations disappear but we shall lose an Atlantis of the mind. There will be and can be no replacement. So far as memory is concerned, we face a universal blank.

When a clerisy fears to pass on its inheritance the treasures are then packed away in the private collections of those who have already amassed cultural resources. What is not publicly offered and automatically maintained cannot be chosen. There is no elitism more naked and negative than the kind which colludes with the current level of impoverishment and so cuts off access to the best. It is plain paternalism and condescension to decide that others are incapable of recognising vigour and beauty. Young people cannot respond to what isn't there or choose what they have never known. Choice presupposes availability, and availability has to be actively brought about. Instead some of the erstwhile guardians actively install their own products and attempt to monopolise the consciousness of the next generation. In political life such activities would be publicly denounced.

Of course, there are those who suppose that some natural law decrees the survival of the best without any institutional assistance: This is just another of those amiable liberal myths according to which culture is the net consequence of untutored choice, regardless of prior content. Yet if prior content is not brought about by decision or by continuous tradition, then there follows the spiral of impoverishment now affecting our daily newspapers. It is even arguable that the Church is following on the trail set by journalism, some two steps behind, and apeing educational fashions which deny access to works written before the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, the liturgy is even more vulnerable than general standards of literacy. The great texts, designed for public reading and liturgical invocation, work in context and they depend on being shared in common. They are not the property of individual minds, but joint heirlooms, prayer held in common. If not invoked in the parish churches of England, they have lost their 'place'. And so have we. The permutations and combinations of GS 364A, together with Series 1½, 2 and 3, unhinge the very idea of a common prayer, offered in a special place.

Not only are we confused by myriad versions of scripture but the new Series 3½ (GS 364A) is pure permuters' pleasure. Altogether it allows 51,000 permutations. The Lord's Prayer alone, still a shared possession of English-speaking peoples, can be varied in combinations which run into three figures. Each coterie of the faithful selects a permutation and seals itself off from the other coteries and from any relationship to the wider culture. Those who stand at the wistful or uncertain margin are excluded. Inner Sanctum excommunicates Outer Court.

The Church of England slips from being a national church to a collocation of conventicles. In trying to reach the man in the street it has succeeded in ejecting the man in the porch. The Bishop of Durham has pointed out how the attempt to make liturgy more accessible to some has made it more inaccessible to others. So not only are we losing the classic texts and a common language: we are turning our back on the very idea of a relation between the church and people at large. To loosen the constraint of Church and State is one thing; to loosen yet further the tie of Church and People is another. No doubt there are many trends here which lie outside the control of the Church. But it is not obliged to accelerate them, or throw away its greatest assets in a fit of panic. (1)

Of course, the motives behind the change are good. Revisers believe that the use of a modern standard grammar will make the church itself seem up to date. They also repudiate some of the emphases in the Book of Common Prayer, preferring to tread softly on sin and also to restore certain primitive elements, such as the epiclesis. They likewise desire to make the rite more communal, allowing for greater participation and the gifts of the People of God. Series 2 has advantages in conforming more to the structural shape of the Latin rite of the Western Church. Series 3 was devised in such a way as to overlap the Roman Catholic wording, and so promote ecumenical gatherings. Yet none of these aims and objectives require the replacement of the historic English form or its brutal demotion. Above all they do not necessitate the adoption of ICET/ICEL texts, designed for some two dozen different English-speaking contexts, and often put together with a rare incompetence in the handling of words. A modern rite could have been devised which was taut, powerful, hard-wearing and invoked the spirit of poetry.

(1) After all, it was Gregory Dix who commented on the destructive effects of engineered discontinuity in the mid-sixteenth century. For incisive comment on the linguistic death wish of the church see the articles by S. Prickett, A. C. Capey and G. Strickland in New Universities Quarterly, Summer 1979.

Today's engineered discontinuity isn't necessary. Ancient emphases, dug up by patient scholarship, could have been recovered and incorporated in alternative or experimental liturgies without displacing the shared frame, or trying to reduce the historic English form to a coterie preference, indulged intermittently for those with the appropriate 'taste'. The alternative services would have been useful if applied as originally advertised. They were, we supposed, what they claimed to be, just 'alternatives'. Now they are being promoted as replacements. It is the insidious promotion of Series 3 (and soon maybe of GS 364A) as a replacement which is so destructive. In local Church and Synod, in General Synod and Lambeth Conference, the pressure is all in one direction. There is no mistaking the clear intent.

Again, it is perfectly possible to publish versions of scripture which make for a racy read or else provide useful instruments of study without displacing the supreme vehicle of public reading in Church. The N.E.B. and other scholarly versions are useful for study and, like the Jerusalem Bible, worthy of occasional selective use in public reading. Similarly, para-phrases like those of J. B. Phillips serve to stab dormant attention alive. But people do not live on a regime of spiritual jerks. To adopt a mélange of versions wholesale is to dislocate memory and to prevent scripture lodging in the mind. The new versions are just not memorable. The powerful cross-references in hymn and sermon are rendered inaccessible.

The culprits are grammarians and vulgarians working in tan-dem. The vulgarians conceive of scripture as a 'read' in the course of which ideas and information are picked up. They do not care about a text which can be appropriated and endlessly repeated, till it provides the furniture of the mind and etches itself on the soul. They do not realise how rich and solid memory deteriorates into bits and pieces-mere fragments, isolated incidents. Yet religion depends on what is known by heart, in the heart. What is not memorable cannot be fed upon 'in the heart by faith with thanksgiving'.

The grammarians, for their part, have a schoolmasterly and illusory notion of standard English which they combine with a talent for liturgical archaeology. They put musicology above music. If Hippolytus in a disputed and fragmentary text of the third century offers us an account of liturgy then it seems we have found a model for today. First, they declare the sixteenth century is archaic, then they find in the third century a model of relevance. Such an attitude is rightly dubbed patristic fundamentalism, yet it allows the grammarians impudently to promote their wares under the mantle of prophecy. The vulgarians and grammarians jointly undo and unpick what Basil Willey called 'the poetry of the Church' in the name of 'relevance'.

To a sociologist these developments betray a number of developments which may not be apparent to those responsible for them. We need to recognise them before they can be assessed. The new texts can be seen as part of several shifts: to sectarianism and mandatory communality, to the ecclesiastical multinational and bureaucratic governance.

The sectarian tendency runs alongside the mandatory communalism and the spontaneity cult, both of which leaked into the Church from the middle-class enthusiasms of the sixties. Not all of these tendencies were unfortunate, and in the participation of the people there was positive gain. Nevertheless, Christians are now enjoined to stand, literally, in a circle, backs to the world, each exposed to the inquisition of other eyes. The defensible space of individuality is eroded. Some like it, and expansively adopt the 'Kiss of Peace', while others feel grossly intruded upon, unable to frame their petitions to Almighty God. (2) The Church exudes groupiness, and generates a kind of Eucharistic MRA. There is collective conformity orchestrated by the priestly 'president' whose personality and style become more prominent than was previously the case. People not only experience the presence of the group, but are exposed to the stylistic vagaries of the eucharistic leader. Dr Roger Homan has sensitively underlined just how this happens in his article 'Noli Me Tangere' (p. 28). The 'people of God' are treated to a dose of pseudogemeinschaft, administered by a 'personality'.

Of course, such enthusiasms are often imports from the American scene, even though petrified by liturgical archaeology. Standing in a circle and the 'Kiss of Peace' are officially promoted by appeal to primitive practice, but the real attraction lies in the ideology of the encounter group. Zeitgeist works under cover of Heiliger Geist. The same influence may be observed at work in the organisation of architectural space, both in schools and housing. In each context, the defensible space of the individual, communing with a book in foro interno, or communing with God upon his knees, is attacked by organised and required fluidity. Christopher Booker, in a recent television programme, has analysed these same tendencies in the architectural fervours of recent years.

Again, the shifts are not necessarily all loss, but it is as well we know what trip we are on. The adoption of 'We believe' is just one pointer to an erosion of individuality which includes an attack on individual responsibility for belief. There is also a curious vein of childishness. Not only do the new texts sound as if devised for children, but there are pervasive reminders of children being 'called together'.

Bureaucratic governance and the shift to the ecclesiastical multinational also run pari passu. The sources of the new texts are put together in odd mid-Atlantic bodies largely financed from the United States: ICET and ICEL. Neither ICET nor ICEL is capable of generating the poetry of the Church, and in any case they work by rubrics which prevent them attempting to do so. They produce bald, rhythmless transliterations which have been foisted on to the Roman Catholic Church and then transferred to the Church of England and the Methodists through the machinery of ecumenical consultation. This process was barely noticed until its baneful products were well established in the parishes, and Anglicans and Catholics now have to work together to see what improvements may be possible. The Association for English Worship exists to do just that. (3)

As for the procedures of the Church of England, concerned clergy and bishops alike are alarmed by bureaucratic encroachment. The very names Series 3 and GS 364A speak bitter volumes. The General Synod had placed before it some one thousand amendments to GS 364A. The Revision Committee which put GS 364A together was composed of hard-line Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals, set to work like scorpions in a bottle. Thus the new liturgy was framed in political compromise as well as bureaucratic procedure. No wonder the Bishop of Durham has claimed that it is as good as may be in the circumstances. It is a claim with which we may even agree.

The indiscriminate urge to inaugurate the ecclesiastical multinational is responsible not only for losses of integrity but for a

(2) The 'Kiss of Peace' is far less intrusive at the end of a service.
(3) The splendid pamphlet by A. R. Walmsley, The Language of Public Worship (Faith Press, 1979) is a publication of 'The Association for English Worship', concerned with the improvement of ICET/ICEL texts.

homogeneity which sorts ill with the fragmentation which occurs at local level. The family resemblance of the new liturgies is part of the thrust to organisational merger and was presumably worked out quite a long time ago. It would be interesting to know how far what was innocently advanced under cover of 'experiment' at parish level was already implicitly long-term policy in the ecclesiastical stratosphere. If so, it would help account for the brushing aside, of unwelcome advice and the refusal to listen to protest, or even acknowledge its existence. Of course the reluctance to tap the creative genius available to the Church is a major cause of disaster.

In any case, the original ecumenical impulse has now been thwarted. Christians once looked forward to a sharing of distinctive traditions and contributions, retaining, however, their character and integrity. Now the distinctive character of the Church of England is simultaneously corroded by surface homogeneity, and by fragmentation and anarchy in the parishes. It is a malign achievement.

Just how bad these mid-Atlantic, inter-ecclesiastical products are can be illustrated by the fate of the Te Deum. The ICET text begins 'You are God, we praise you'. The reasoning behind such efforts can only arouse stunned disbelief. The mighty invocation 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts' was excised because a Roman reviser thought that 'hosts' might be confused with the Host. As for 'we believe', it was imported from an ICEL text which ignored the new Latin Mass as well as the old. Most language groups in the Roman Church have retained 'I believe'. The Anglican Church has simply reproduced the trendy collectivism which appealed to ICEL.

These changes are justified by reference to shifts in theological belief, especially perhaps among some of the clergy. This Review is not the place to debate nice points of theology, except to say that no single liturgy is likely to convey the full range of devotion or be entirely satisfactory to this or that school of theology. Liturgy is many-layered, rooted in the cumulations of history. One can only say that the Cranmerian liturgy assumes the deep flaw in humanity and the centrality of the cross as the Christian salve and sign. The twentieth century is hardly a time in which ubiquitous guilt, the crucifixion of hope or the redemption of suffering has become redundant.

Perhaps one theological illustration may be permitted. We are faced with a fundamental clash over the nature of the sacred. For some the sacred is either not a Christian category at all or is discoverable only in so far as it is universally diffused. This viewpoint, which can be defended, neglects the fact that the transcendent is defined by embodiment, and acquires thereby a local habitation and a name. What is diffused everywhere soon exists nowhere. The transcendent has an 'otherness' which requires signs and symbols of transition and demarcation.

A man or woman approaching a church, whether to pray, stare, think or visit 'a serious place on serious earth' receives signals of transition. People walk and speak differently. They neither march nor run because this is not an arena or a parade ground. The tower sends out signals in the ancient language of bells. The sanctuary glows in the light of candles. The officiant is dressed in ascetic splendour. All these convey the sense of alteration, distinguishing the divine colony from the waste land and demarcating the perfect from the ruined. To some people these markers shut in the divine glory, to others they make the glory potent and visible by providing an embodiment here and now. We are for an embodiment and for distinctiveness.

A distinctive language provides one major threshold to a new awareness. We hear, as George Steiner puts it, 'the prayer in the syntax'. It contains images of vision and alteration, a double entendre, an intimation of glory. Overhearing that prayerful syntax even the most casual passer-by, obsessed with the utilitarian and the pragmatic, can catch the hint of glory, even if he gives it no philosophic weight. He is momentarily glad that other things are here remembered and that all the layers of man's search for meaning are summed up. Perhaps for a brief second the shape of stone, or sense of rhythm, allows him to stand recollected, noticing in himself the emergence of a new being which otherwise is buried in tussle and hassle. In the creation of that moment of recollection language and posture provide the sacramental instruments. A man or woman is overtaken by an interior quiet, made manifold in the rhythm and movement of words. The word is made flesh and the figures of speech allow transfiguration. The figure of a man or woman is differently framed, and the altered frame finds expression in a new disposition of hands, knees and eyes: prayer.

Yet precisely these transitions, alterations and new distinctive dispositions of body and mind are weakened by intrusive communalism and by the destruction of those rhythms and movements which inform marrow and blood.

The linguistic principles undergirding the new liturgy are discussed in the body of the Review. Nevertheless, one or two contrary theses are worth nailing to the door. For example, it is absurd to talk about the language of Cranmer as if it presented the order of difficulty found in Chaucer. Cranmer writes in the early modern form of our language and offers no serious barriers whatsoever. The much touted half-dozen examples of altered meaning offer happy opportunity for a moment's explanation. After that they are the better understood for having aroused curiosity. If there were any difficulty the hymns would also be inaccessible, and that they clearly are not. Cranmer is as simple as: 'O God our help in ages past'. People talk loosely of 'beautiful Shakespearian English' when in fact Cranmer is not at all like Shakespeare and very much more simple.

So the revisers cannot appeal to Cranmer's own dictum about worshipping in a language 'understanded of the people'. Moreover, when Cranmer set out about Englishing the liturgy he did not use 'everyday' English any more than he used Shakespearian English. The Book of Common Prayer was no more written in everyday English than was the Authorised Version. Indeed, the Authorised Version adopted what was already in 1611 an archaic style. The language of worship is properly distinctive, just as the language of sport or of auctioneering is today.

Some say that the old words not only separate their users from 'life' but give off the impression of a rather old-fashioned activity unadjusted to the imperatives of the pragmatic, utilitarian world. Leaving aside the curious preference for 'adjustment' the Book of Common Prayer has been strictly out of date for centuries, and never more so than in the eighteenth century when it nurtured such men as Johnson and Wesley. Linguistic ageing is odd. Once the initial ageing is over, great words harden and resist 'the unimaginable touch of time'. Meanwhile today's essay in relevance already resembles yesterday's fashion magazines. Furthermore, since English is now so fluid the current exercise in translation will have to be repeated very rapidly if it is to be true to its proclaimed principles.

Finally, we have not in fact been presented with everyday, or with market-place English. We have the lingo of Erewhon. Nobody speaks like Series 3/3½, not in County Durham, Walsall, or Ryme Intrinseca. What we have is grammarians' officialese, the outward forms deployed by the middling classes on their best grammatical behaviour, and instantly recognised as such. If the idea is to eliminate the status signals given off by usage, then the situation now is even worse than it was before.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

The question is simple. Does the Church of England commit itself to maintain the classic texts or not? All the policies and tendencies presently encouraged suggest not. We face an unsigned death warrant. The Book of Common Prayer is constantly cried down. It is no longer a central part of theological college life, if indeed it is used at all. Those being prepared for confirmation are kept well away from it, and are inducted only into the new rite. The established refuges in Matins and Evensong are either being discontinued or themselves given over to Series 3. Token gestures apart, all major occasions follow the new usage.

It has been argued that this is a natural process. This is sheer equivocation. Everywhere there is pressure to relinquish the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version. PCCs are sometimes subject to manipulation or kept in ignorance of their rights. Oftentimes there is no due process at all, merely an arbitrary decision. The reluctance of the laity to interfere in the vicar's domain or to divide a small community is exploited. The term 'experiment' is used to imply a temporary trial, rather than a permanent imposition. The rhetoric of 'choice' is used to cover over the fact that even where PCCs assent to the new usage there are many who give way reluctantly only because they are told it is a sacrifice required to retain the young. Their unhappy acquiescence is taken for approbation.

It is also put about that the Book of Common Prayer is really still there simply because it is available at eight o'clock or midweek. But since the emphasis now lies on a main service mid-morning, this means that many of those who prefer the old form nevertheless attend at that time, particularly if they have children, or adolescents inducted in the new order. They feel constrained to be part of the main body of worshippers, whatever their personal preferences.

In any case, there are now many churches where there is no pretence of celebrating the historic liturgy at all, and it is plainly put about that those who want it should travel considerable distances (4) leaving their own communities and all their old associates and associations. Only five years ago Dr David Frost of the Liturgical Commission could say in good faith that, after all, nobody would be deprived access to the historic liturgy. This is no longer true. Promises made by one authority are broken by others. It is a situation which would arouse unfavourable comment even in the world of politics, let alone the household of faith. It is no wonder that Bishop Roberts has detected rumblings which in his view could lead to a second Pilgrimage of Grace.

Whatever one thinks of the traditional liturgy, the treatment of loyal people is nothing short of a disgrace, and there are signs that more and more of those set in authority accept that this is so. The bland assurances of one or two prelates in the House of Lords read curiouser and curiouser. After all, the Church of

(4) Cf. debate on Lord Sudeley's motion, Lords, 17.3.1978.

England is not the kind of body where if the authorities turn we all turn. The Bishop of Durham referred sensitively to a growing sense of anti-clericalism and it is not difficult to say why. People do not like being pushed from pillar to porch even though some of them would rather suffer than campaign. They are not yet used to a church which takes after a political model rather than the model of a service. They believe the innocent landscape is there in the course of nature and they cannot face the need for protest and mobilisation. Once forced to do that they feel they have already lost.

We feel the same. To argue with the Church as if it were some trade union pushed around by an articulate minority feels like conformity to the new modes and manners. Yet there are signs of increasing disquiet. Clergy who initially felt the pressure to follow on the way indicated wonder if some less destructive approach may be possible. Those in the higher echelons who supported the first moves are startled or bemused by the consequences. Bureaucratisation and Americanisation still encroach, but more and more see what is at stake. People realise how processes get out of hand and acquire a momentum beyond human wills. One of the problems is just how thoughtful clergy can have drifted so far from the laity. A Gallup Poll among American Episcopalians showed the clergy four to one against the traditional liturgy and the laity three to one for it.

Above all, perhaps, the ordinary diocesan and parish priest wonder about the procedures and processes which go on in the ecclesiastical stratosphere and about the products of the transatlantic mind. Commission speaks to commission. They generate mutual approval of their own achievements. Dissident members are discreetly dropped. Unpalatable advice is ignored, or just not sought. In the nature of the case disagreements are not aired in the public forum. Those consulted and then disregarded recognise a steady determination to accept only what is hammered on the approved anvil. Approval given when a course was initiated is carried over to justify developments and unintended consequences of a far-reaching kind. As in educational change useful moves forward reach a point where they undermine the realisation of their own highest aims. Nobody seems quite 'responsible', yet the destruction continues. In the end people capitulate to what they wrongly regard as the inevitable, grow tired of argument, or falsely suppose the 'experts' know what they are up to. But the experts do not know what they are up to and the trend is not inevitable.

It is worth emphasising that those who wish to retain the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version as a natural and innocent part of an English mental landscape are not against innovation and experiment. Indeed they include some of the most experimental and creative writers in English. It is the lack of creative effort which they deplore. Their resources have never been called upon, or where called upon have been ignored. Tinkering with Cranmer is the office of a Bowdler or a Garrick. John Wesley had sharp words for such tinkerers even though he placed piety above poetry, and in his preface of 1780 wrote: 'None of them is able to mend either the sense or the verse'. (5) This point stands today.

Believers need to maintain the historic liturgy and to try to find forms which freshly mint the hope and faith of the Christian religion. The Principal of Westcott House has rightly commented in the Westcott Chronicle that what we have now

(5) Those who promise to do over some two hundred of the best-loved hymns might take this admonition to heart.

'arouses no joy at all. It is just not good enough.' In our view that means alternatives should remain alternatives and not become replacements.

If the historic liturgy is to remain, then it should be restored and entrenched as part of the ordinary innocent experience of any one confirmed into the English Church or entering its ministry. Continuity can be retained without inhibiting experiment. Similarly in the ordinary parishes the historic form needs to have a secure and honoured place, and be used regularly for at least some of the principal services, so long as any sizeable group desires it. Of course where the 1928 service has been traditional then that too should be available. There are problems here relating to Series 1½ and 2, because there exists a largish body of opinion which is prepared, even happy, to go as far as Series 2, but remains unhappy with Series 3. Indeed some regard Series 2 as being consonant with the broad practice of the Western Church without being disloyal to the achievement of the Prayer Book. They want the Prayer Book as the foundation of Anglican awareness but would hope that Series 2 continued to be used alongside it. Yet others think Series 2 a thin bowdlerisation and Series 3 a new mintage.

Problems of this kind are a measure of the confusion we now confront. We do not presume to solve them here. Nevertheless the broad principle suggested above is not the arrogant invention of academics. The Standing Sub-Committee of the General Synod in its Guide to Parishes (1975) itself suggested that even where Series 3 was adopted the Book of Common Prayer should be used at a main service one or more times a month. If that reconciling and unifying gesture were to be implemented, and guaranteed in perpetuity, the present protest would not be necessary. We only ask for proposals to be backed by authority and implemented in practice. The Bishop of Durham himself has come out firmly against pushing people against the wall.

Such pushing is particularly grievous with respect to Matins and Evensong. To subject those services to the linguistic treatment meted out elsewhere is to do damage for no good reason whatever. If we agree with the Vice-Principal of Westcott House that such services are indeed not easily maintained in (say) a Liverpool housing estate it can be safely asserted that nobody fresh will be attracted to them in gutted form in housing estates or anywhere else. The wrecking of Matins and Evensong can have no conceivable rationale. Of course, there are those who denigrate such services on principle because they think God can only be worshipped Eucharistically. Even so, they may have some regard for those who believe that constant pressure towards frequent communication actually cheapens the Eucharist.

The pressure against the traditional marriage and burial services is also grievous, especially where incumbents refuse a church wedding unless conducted according to the new rite. The traditional services for baptism, marriage and burial should be easily available, and nobody should be dragooned into the new rite.

The use of the Authorised Version presents a rather different kind of problem. It would seem possible to educate people in its use, and also in the selective deployment of the alternatives. Such sensitivity to what is appropriate is not so difficult to acquire. There are very few passages which present serious difficulty. The important point is to retain a fundamental stock of shared language and common reference, so that quotation continues to carry power and resonance. Children should be provided with copies of the King James Bible, perhaps in a new format. The constant promotion of the New English Bible through gifts and prizes is all the time undermining the shared frame of reference on which memory and affection depend. Of course, this is also a task for schools, both in Religious Education and English. The object of learning is not just information, chat or archaeology but shared poetry, appropriated by heart.

These are simply the preconditions of survival, otherwise 'be ye well assured' that by the year 2000 the Church of England will have ditched its most potent resources. Generation will have been sundered from generation, the shared devotional inheritance of English-speaking peoples dissipated, and the future handed over to utilitarian disposables.