Evensong is an apt title for this beautifully written and moving meditation on the history and current state of the Church of England, partly because it names the service which more than any other incarnates the patient, meditative, undogmatic nature of the faith. As Richard Morris puts it, “Anglican evensong has been described as a home for the hesitant, a service for those who put store by doubt as well as belief.”

And, as he points out, it uses such moving language. The evening Collects are what stick in my mind from singing in a church choir half a century ago. “Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.” I never really understood what the perils were but I was very glad to be protected from them. Then there are those lovely lines that Morris likes so much he actually quotes them twice: “Minister: keep me as the apple of an eye. Us: Hide me under the shadow of thy wings.”

But there’s another more melancholy reason for the aptness of the title. The Church of England is approaching its own evening. Morris tells us that fewer than two per cent of the population attend church services, and many churches are entirely redundant, “outwardly part of the scene but functionally meaningless husks”.

This is a cause of both sorrow and exasperation for the author, whose own life has been entwined with the Church since boyhood. He has a deep feeling for the continuities embodied in the rituals, language and even the stones of the church.

These were imbued in him from an early age, thanks to a childhood spent in various parsonages, where his father, an energetic and strong-willed parish priest – whose obituary appeared in this newspaper – was the incumbent (and if you’re not sure what an “incumbent” is, or why the author grew up in parsonages rather than vicarages, the glossary of Anglican terms at the beginning will put you right).