There is no possibility whatsoever of capturing this heavenly depiction of the Christian life in the crude nets of attitude surveys. Their function is to trawl through and test the relative strength of complex variables, but not to penetrate the deepest layers of moral character. Yet this very act of trawling should be able to detect the traces of love, but not of course the quality or depths of love, amongst the shoals of churchgoers.

It should be possible at least to see whether or not church-goers intend to put others first as they are instructed to in the Dominical Commands. The New Testament, Christian prayers and Christian liturgies are saturated with the theologic articulated so concisely in the Johannine Epistles, ‘Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another’, and so dynamically in the eschatological parable of the sheep and the goats: