Two articles of note in the latest Spectator:

Mary Wakefield reviewing and rethinking (with momentary doubt) the rightness and legacy of Anglican female ordination. She concludes eloquently, and looks toward the next "new thing" to "open up" (read: water down and destroy/read: create more Roman Catholics) the Anglican Church: What eventually brought me back to my original position, opposed to the ordination of women, was not the Scriptures or even the fun of sneering, but looking at what has happened to the C of E over the last ten years. In 1992, the Bishop of Sheffield made a public statement explaining his opposition to women priests, ‘The reforms before us this week find their momentum not from Scripture, but from the generally held beliefs of everyone today,’ he said, ‘and once this replaces Scripture and tradition as the authority for the Church’s doctrine, almost anything becomes possible. What will be next? The parity of homosexual and heterosexual marriage?’ The Bishop has, of course, been proved right. The more the Anglican Church has tried to keep up with the times, to placate and include minorities, the more schismatic it has become. More than 500 priests defected to Rome after the Synod approved female ordination, and there is still a hard core of traditionalist bishops who exclude women priests from their dioceses.

The question of homosexual clergy is having much the same effect as the ordination of women. This Friday the General Synod begins its debate on ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ to try to resolve the conflict: right-wing evangelicals side with the Anglo-Catholic aesthetes against the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Church in Africa is not talking to the Church in England, which in turn, is on non-speakers with the North American Church. Nor, once you’ve started the process of modernising, does there seem to be any end to the process: on Tuesday, for instance, the General Synod decided that the three wise men who visited Christ in Bethlehem could no longer be described as men. ‘While it seems very unlikely that these Persian court officials were female,’ said the Synod, ‘the possibility that one or more of the Magi were women cannot be excluded completely.’ A few days after the service, I came across a saying of a former dean of St Paul’s, the writer and preacher William Ralph Inge: ‘He who marries the spirit of the age will soon become a widower.’

And Theodore Dalrymple on the disinterestedness of modern business, in this case banks. The quintessential "big concern" (Schumpeter's term) in no fear of competition or customer unhappiness, abandons real service for the fake friendliness of first-name only phone operators (the omnipresent "Donna"). Dealing with commercial monopolies, or monopsonies, is often not so very different from dealing with government departments, particularly in England, where the customer, far from being king, is a bloody nuisance, whose importuning has the grossly unjust effect of interrupting Donna’s daydream of next weekend’s Saturday night clubbing, which as we know is the real, indeed the whole, end of human existence.