ABSTRACT
The English men and women who saw out the last three decades of the Raj had been brought up as Christians. The formal religious instruction they had received was uneven. Doubt and indifference towards the Christian tradition after the Great War could be freely acknowledged and was frequently lamented. But within the preparatory schools and public schools, which trained the imperial middle class and the greater part of the small ‘India public’ of the inter-war period, that there was a Christian core to the imperial civilisation continued to be confirmed daily in compulsory religious observance and in subtler ways that permeated teaching practices and social relationships. 1 The leading public schools were self-consciously Christian foundations and the ascendancy of the great clerical headmasters was by no means over. Educational theorists like A.D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol and first Vice-Chancellor of Keele University, whose political thinking now finds itself dusted off and reconsidered with something like an apology for the archaism of its explicitly Christian commitment, spoke with the confidence of authority addressing a period in which Christianity was still ‘a live force in British intellectual life’. 2 Lindsay, like other influential publicists – such as his friend William Temple, a former headmaster (not a very successful one) of Repton, but unique among archbishops for the breadth of his appeal as a writer and a speaker – was very conscious of his obligation to protect Christianity as an informing presence both in domestic politics and in imperial trusteeship.
