Some time during the 1920s the local religious classes lost heart. They ceased to believe in their mission to evangelise the nation. Not, of course, in its necessity; only its practicality. It no longer seemed possible. And it had become a burden. In that pessimism, they were in good company. It was widely shared by their superiors, in Canterbury, London and abroad. A new, and a disturbing sense that society as a whole had ceased to be, or was gradually ceasing to be, in any meaningful sense, religious, and was therefore now strictly speaking beyond even the very best efforts of a committed Christian minority to save it, became something of an official commonplace at that time. Certainly, it has been well reported, and widely corroborated, ever since. And it generally forms the empirical basis, the fundamental evidence, for that widely identified shift in social mores and of cultural expression which marks the secularisation of society.

As such, it was an attitude which stood in stark contrast to the characteristic sensibilities of dedicated churchmen and ministers, in West Yorkshire as elsewhere in the United Kingdom, around 1870. In almost every case, what these people emphasised were not the burdens but the possibilities of mission. Local and national ecclesiastical history during the late part of the nineteenth century makes no sense in any other light.