Can you imagine for one moment what England would have been like today without those churches and all that those churches mean? …
“Certainly it would not have been safe to walk the streets. All respect, decency, all those things which tend to make modern civilization what it is would not have been in existence. You can imagine what we should have had to pay for our police, for lunatic asylums, for criminal asylums.”
— Duke of Devonshire, 1800s, quoted in God Is Back by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.
The above was here.