For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead.
It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian.
Here, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European c.