ABSTRACT
'Faith, hope, charity but the greatest of these is charity', and it is charity that we most need; we who read the writing of the church need charity to cope with our differences. And that is precisely what the contributors to this volume have accomplished, they have agreed to write side by side even though there are, as is obvious, enormous differences in religious conviction, theoretical assumptions and critical style. Insofar as charity has made this possible, the volume might just suggest that 'English Literature', the discipline founded on the ruins of the Victorian church, is itself a kind of church, a community held together by a common passion. At other times, though, it may also lead us to an uncanny, haunting sense that in the very act of reading and writing we are somehow 'in church', somehow being churchy; it is akin to Tambling's sense that 'there is no outside of the church.'
