Anglicanism, Jane Austen, and Jeeves

Much of the credit for Britain's stiff upper lip attitude and "non-excitable soldiering-through"must go to the Anglican settlement, the Book of Common Prayer, and the ancient British Church that predated Roman primacy. The Gallic Church in France was much less successful (as 1789 witnessed), and noteworthy for proving that ideas may have consequences, but they also have hidden subtleties that lead to drastically different results depending upon where one is standing. An independent Church worked extraordinarily well in England. It was a unequivocal disaster in France. Unlike Britain, who nationalized their Church rather successfully by the Act of Dissolution under Henry VIII, France proceeded straight from nationalization into revolution into civil war into world war into apostasy with blinding speed. What is medicine to one may prove death to another. Talleyrand as head of a Gallican clergy was about as good an idea as Kerensky at the head of the Russian Revolution.
To the contrary, in Britain, people kept the "Common Faith", culturally/personally/numerically, much longer, arguably even to this day. The end result today may be similar, but Britain proceeded upon a steadier basis, which created the British national character of muddling through with dignity, aplomb, and bulldog resoluteness and indifference. That, plus more than a little steady help from Wesley, Whitefield, and the like, who deserve the lion's share of credit with preventing the French Revolution from spreading to England's green and happy land.
The Gallic Church flirted with independence all throughout the Middle Ages, even taking the Papacy captive at Avignon. Even so, France remained staunchly Catholic in character. As Leon Bloy remarked, the Catholics in France remained pelerins d'absolu (pilgrims of the absolute). Hence the bloodshed and the cry of incresz infame!. The entire Anglican settlement, au contraire, was a via media between Scotch Calvinism and High Church Catholicism. Richard Hooker http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/64.html best expressed this Anglican grace of moderation when he stated: "God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright."
Jane Austen's novels of morals, miniatures, and manners would have been inconceivable without this "settlement" of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Her entire, idyllic, charming, and yet utterly realistic world of the country gentry and seafaring souls would have never occured had not the Reformation confiscated church lands for the middle gentry and the Glorious Revolution not launched the seafaring Empire where sailors went forth with "all the world before them and Providence their guide" (the last lines of Paradise Lost). When Queen Elizabeth designed the book of Common Prayer, her aim was to provide something with which Catholics and Protestants alike could worship in peace of conscience. In otherwords, the Anglican settlement was aimed at restoring peace and prosperity to the island of England, while preserving tradition, orthodoxy, and the insights of the martyred Ridley, Cranmer, and Latimer. There were martyrs for the Faith upon both sides in England, under Bloody Mary and Elizabeth. As 1588 showed, it was a close thing whether the Protestants would be able to remove England from the Catholic sphere of nations.
Jane Austen's beautiful landscape of genuine, evangelical moralism is inconceivable without Anglicanism. I hold her novels to be a refutation of any anathema directed against the Anglican Church en masse.