A few years later, the great Victorian critic, Matthew Arnold, chose to devote an essay to Falkland, writing of him as an early champion of the political liberty that was coming to prevail in his own time:

"Shall we blame him for his lucidity of mind and largeness of temper? Shall we even pity him? By no means. They are his great title to veneration. They are what make him ours; what link him with the nineteenth century. He and his friends, by their heroic and hopeless stand against the inadequate ideals dominant in their time, kept open their communications with the future, lived with the future. Their battle is ours too; and that we pursue it with fairer hopes of success than they did, we owe to their having waged it, and fallen."

Thus far, the story is as follows: a liberal humanist ethos and its supporting humanist anthropology is a particular option, not a natural, default position; it is therefore subject to competition and vulnerable to being overwhelmed — as indeed it has been; accordingly public institutions that would stay liberal need actively to promote a liberal ethos, and the humanist view that makes sense of it; they also need to affirm larger worldviews that make sense of its humanist anthropology; there are various possibilities, not all of which can be affirmed simultaneously by the same institutions or in the same public rituals; one, thereforeneeds to be chosen; in England, Anglican Christianity is — notwithstanding the blemishes on its historical record — the sitting, and not unworthy, candidate.  

One immediate retort to this would be that, while Anglicanism may be the sitting candidate, there is a better one standing. But is there? There are, of course, other, non-religious liberal humanisms. However, the extent to which these are intellectually viable apart from a theological basis is controversial; and it is controversial not only from the point of view of religious believers, but also in the eyes of some agnostic or atheist philosophers. Jürgen Habermas, for example, has admitted that religious traditions "have the distinction of a superior capacity for articulating our [liberal, humanist] moral sensibility";  and Raymond Gaita thinks that secular philosophical talk about inalienable human dignity and rights is just so much "whistling in the dark", such notions having no secure home outside religious traditions.