The Lost Vision

I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, form the time I went to my public school I was excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion was a hobby which some people professed and others did not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of "complexes" and "inhibitions" -- catchwords of the decade - and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one has ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent, philosophic system and intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited