From T.S. Eliot’s essay, The Social Function of Poetry.

Much has been said everywhere about the decline of religious belief; not so much notice has been taken of the decline of religious sensibility. The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it becomes meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death.

We are asked if there might be a Bernard or a Hildebrand in our midst. The answer is simple: No. There are no Bernards, there are no Hildebrands, there are no Bachs and there are no Mendelssohns. Those men were not the fruit of a single season or a recent rain, and we are not going to produce them in a summer, even with genetic modification.

The poets of our past were shaped by a culture which transmitted these feelings to them and to their audience. In fact, it wouldn’t matter if there were Bernards and Hildebrands; who would they speak to? Their audience is dead. Who would they speak to? The men who choose our hymns for Sunday mornings? The men who publish our hymnbooks? The men who croon for our children?

A culture does not exist in libraries, it exists in readers. The Celestial City does not live on paper, it lives in the imagination of saints.

We already have the works of Bernard, Hildebrand and Bach. We have stacks and stacks of great liturgy. We do not sing them. We object to singing them because that would be elitist. We object to singing them because we cannot relate to them. We object to singing them because the people we want to coax into our churches cannot relate to them. [And clearly, Bernard, Hildebrand and Bach are not important enough that we should see to it that Christians are taught to value them.] We now believe that Bernard and Milton have nothing to say; we believe Third Day and The Joy Quartet are better voices to convey our feelings of piety.

We chose to ignore our poets. We have now descended to the point where we laugh at what they do. We watch football because that helps us to “relate to our people”.

You want Christian sensibility? Try this:

There’s a church in the valley by the wildwood,
No lovelier spot in the dale;
No place is so dear to my childhood,
As the little brown church in the vale.

How sweet on a clear, Sabbath morning,
To list to the clear ringing bell;
Its tones so sweetly are calling,
Oh, come to the church in the vale.

There, close by the church in the valley,
Lies one that I loved so well;
She sleeps, sweetly sleeps, ’neath the willow,
Disturb not her rest in the vale.

From the church in the valley by the wildwood,
When day fades away into night,
I would fain from this spot of my childhood
Wing my way to the mansions of light.

Look at it! This is a place dear to his childhood, the place where a bell rings sweetly, a grave under a willow, and, finally, (sniffle, sniffle) a place to die.

Can I get a hanky over here?

In two days I will attend a church with some lovely Thomas Kinkade paintings in the vestibule, and a choir will gently rock as it sings to me of the Almighty. I may even take a pillow.

Mr. Eliot could have jotted down notes for his essay while sitting in our churches.