Many elegaic conservatives, from Matthew Arnold to Roger Scruton, have concluded just this without being exactly Christian themselves. I hope they’re wrong for a couple of reasons.The first is that they are in essence claiming that our only hope is to believe something repugnant to reason. This seems to me to lose the most noble legacy of Christianity: the assertion that humanity and truth are despite all the evidence compatible. It is also open to the elegant mockery of Christians like Libby Purves, who remarked of Scruton’s pessimism that he was the first man to argue that we should throw out the baby and keep the bath water.The second reason is that I don’t think people will happily and consciously believe things they know to be false We’re just not built that way It may not be nobility of character.

It may simply be that we suspect the truth will give us an edge in dealing with each other. But in any case, the idea that we should believe things because they are good for use doesn’t work outside Alcoholics Anonymous, which is extremely vague about what exactly these beliefs should be.I think it’s more interesting to twist the elegaic conservative argument through 90 degrees. Religions, as we know them, are really modelled on Christendom. But Christendom does not describe a mode of thought or even a set of beliefs, so much as a way of understanding and arranging society. It fulfilled a great many lasting human needs that have no obvious organisational connection to spirituality.This disconnection became apparent first intellectually when people learnt that you could best discover all sorts of truths, philosophical, historical and scientific, without reference to religious authority. In this century it has become obvious socially, as more and more of the special functions of religion are taken over by the welfare state, and to some extent by the mass media.The one irreplaceable function which seems to remain to them is to link an awareness of the transcendent into some kind of workable moral code.

So we tend to think that this must be the essence of religion. But it’s not clear that religions, considered as social arrangements, can have an essence at all.If our ideas of religion descend from the Old Testament world of the tribe in a salt and bitter desert, clinging mostly to God and always to each other, they may not survive at all their inversion into a Californian world of huge material comfort and no real social bonds at all. The lasting human needs that give rise to what we now call religious belief will remain, but there’s no reason to suppose that religions themselves will.. IF HEALTH visitors broke the mould of nurse education by moving into universities, as Elaine Wilkie, the first director of the Council for the Education and Training of Health Visitors, considered, it was she who set them in the direction to do it. Wilkie determined to get health visitor training out of the hands of medical officers, who were their employers.

And she was emphatic that health visitors should first train first as nurses. She was a pioneering educationalist while herself suffering the continuing pain of rheumatoid arthritis and for much of the time also being a carer for her invalid mother.
Elaine Wilkie was born in Edinburgh in 1915 and went to George Watson’s Ladies College. When she was 12 her father, a grain broker, died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. With a nursing background on her mother’s side, Wilkie chose to train as a nurse and to do so at King’s College Hospital in London, rather than in Edinburgh.