Just now, hopes are high. I have talked to Church people who actively dislike evangelicals, but even they express complete trust in Dr Welby’s openness. No one expects a war between High and Low, Anglo-Catholics and Bible-bashers. They expect an archbishop who will speak bravely to England, and the wider world, in clear English, about the claims that Jesus makes on the life of society and on each human being.

Like virtually everyone in British public life, since the destruction of the grammar schools froze social mobility, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is an Old Etonian. If people have an image of Etonians, it is usually a worldly one – the easy, well-mannered gentleman, or the smug, arrogant bastard, according to taste. Etonians are not often thought of as holy.

And it is true that the dominant tone of the school disapproves of religious enthusiasm. One day when I was a boy at Eton, I came across my housemaster in a rage. He had just discovered something terrible, he said. I assumed he had unearthed a den of smokers or a cache of pornography. Not at all. “I have found that boys are holding prayer meetings in this house,” he exclaimed, “I won’t have it!” This made me laugh a lot, not least because he was himself a clergyman.

Young Welby, who was my contemporary, is a classic example of what was bothering my dear (and, secretly, devout) housemaster. If he’d been in my house, he would have been caught praying. He stands in a strong, but never fashionable tradition of public-school Christian seriousness – an unadorned, personal faith in Jesus as the saviour, and a lifelong sense of obligation to do His work in the world.

At Trinity College, Cambridge, where Justin Welby, and I, went next, this type of Christianity was even more marked. The Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union (CICU, always pronounced “kick you”) was – and, I think, still is – the largest student society in the university. It was Protestant, Biblical, evangelical. A good many Etonians – many of them, by chance, called Nick or Nicky – were pillars of it. So, in a quiet way, was Welby. Two of the Nickys used to invite me to hearty and delicious teas (evangelicals love buns and crumpets) and talk to me about Jesus, sometimes playing me tapes of sermons by prominent preachers.

Although always a Christian, and, at that time, an Anglican, I was brought up to disapprove strongly of this stuff. Evangelicals were considered anti-intellectual, unhistorical and humourless. They were thought bigoted (it was alleged that they had a pamphlet called “Bringing Catholics to Christ”), and manipulative of the weak and lonely.

I never did become an evangelical or join CICU. But I did notice that the caricature, though not always wrong, was basically unfair. The people who fed me buns were good people. They felt that Jesus was changing their lives, and they wanted to spread His good news. They did it honestly, conscientiously and kindly. They took seriously Jesus’s famous “Great Commission” – “Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.” They helped many, even cynical young me.

Move forward to today. One of those hospitable Nickys, the Rev Nicky Gumbel, is the vicar of Holy Trinity, Brompton – “HTB”, the most famous evangelical church in Britain. In 1990, he took over a modest course of Christian instruction called Alpha, and changed it. Instead of it being for existing believers, he and his colleagues aimed it at people outside the Church.

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