Let Us Praise Ordinary Men

Bird Dog over at Maggie's links to this piece by Theodore Dalrymple, which I found moving.

This was not the unctuous, hypocritical, exploitative religiosity that Dickens satirised about the same time in the character of Mr Chadband in Bleak House, but the real thing that consoled for the losses that were so much more frequent a feature of life in the mid-nineteenth century. Death in those days was not mainly for the old, as in ours.