Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“Is it not rather our experience that, while men are in health, their health is the last subject which preoccupies them; that is only when symptoms of age or decay begin to set in that that air their maladies for public inspection? The same reflections applies to the body politic: in the piping time of Victorian prosperity people did not talk about trade or employment- it would have been almost vulgar: nor did people exercise their minds over the continuance of our world-hegemony; they took it for granted. It is when the public mind becomes less easy on such topics that they are freely ventilated. If these analogies have any worth, it is difficult not to conclude that a society talks about religion more freely and more publicly when religion is beginning to die out. Like the enfeebled pulse or the dwindling exports, the empty pew begins, for the first time, to arrest our attention.”