There’s a lovely passage in John Moore’s Brensham Village (second volume of the Brensham Trilogy, one of the great accounts of British rural life), in which Mr Chorlton, the retired prep-school classics teacher, talks about his affection for the absurdities and rituals of the Church of England, agnostic though he is:
The funny thing is that thousands of people who don’t believe in it have the same feeling. I suppose in Greece and Rome, when the old gods fell out of favour and people ceased to believe in their thunderbolts and their power, the crumbling ivy-grown altars were still regarded with a sort of half-amused, half-apologetic affection, and people made an occasional shame-faced sacrifice at them for old time’s sake. That is how I feel about the C. of E. and I still wonder why!
Sphinx 