What do you do when a friend declares that he’s agnostic?

The other day I had an exchange of texts with a young – well, 30-year-old – friend, who was sounding off about the “political, unforgiving, unchristian, pharisaical” attack by the Church of England bishops on the prime minister’s adviser, Dominic Cummings. I heartily agreed. We got onto the subject of the CofE and its nominal members, such as the late Roger Scruton who was both Anglican and atheist. “I sort of am too”, he said. “C of E agnostic, really.”

I was appalled, not least because he had been one of the very few actual Christians in my office. I rushed online to get him wholesome reading. What do you get a man whose faith is wavering?

G K Chesterton, obviously, as a first resort, specifically Orthodoxy, that admirable book written before he became a Catholic, which is wholly Catholic in spirit. It was more or less an account of what he found congenial in the faith, so written to explain himself rather than to persuade an outsider. But in the course of it he gives a quite brilliant account of Christian doctrine. The bit that stayed with me is his reflection on the Trinity: “It is not good for God to be alone.”