For all the concern of religious people in the nineteenth century about the declining power of the Church, the encroachments of the state, and the growing tendency of ordinary men, and to a lesser extent women, in the industrializing centres of population to cease religious practice except in social rites of passage such as baptisms, marriages and funerals, Europe remained an overwhelmingly religious culture right up to the First World War. Indeed, the nineteenth century was the age above all others when Christians in Europe sought to carry their message to the rest of the world through a vast
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