Religious sociology, as an academic study in its own right, is scarcely twenty years old, and as yet its true dimensions have hardly been realized. Indeed Professor Gabriel Le Bras, its virtual founder, can speak with pardonable rhetoric of its ‘limitless horizons', since it ‘embraces all times, all countries, all man's dreams of time and the infinite'. Of course there is a sense in which the material which the religious sociologist considers has always been there. The Church exists among men, in time and place, and even the old testament provides ample evidence of the close connection between men's worship of God and the social setting in which it is to be achieved.

The structure of the Church's organized life is a palimpsest of her history. To that extent it is a matter of chance, or perhaps one should say of the providence that ordained her growth in terms of particular cultures and societies.