“If you had been sitting in this same city a hundred years ago, you would have found that every Christian talked as I do.”He was right, of course He’s unnervingly familiar with those days. He asked about my family, and named three Victorian Protestant preachers named Brown: were any of them related?”I am looked upon as an antiquarian and a fool, but the gospel is the only thing that saves,” he said. When he started preaching, he explained, in a small country congregation, there were 64 people there. “And when I’d preached for six months, there were 30 left.” He gave a great carnivorous laugh. “Then God started to talk – public houses were closed around there, gambling houses were closed down… and now there are 1,250 children in my Sunday school in each week I was despised, hated, and laughed at They said I was a fool.

I may be a fool, but the gospel I preach is the gospel that saves. If the whole world believed as I believe, I wouldn’t think I was on a moral pathway.”Paisley carries in his breast pocket a New Testament, bound in brown leather, like a diary, which he pulls out to demonstrate particular quotations. “The reason you don’t know what I’m saying is simply because you yourself have not the experience. The Bible tells me that – `the natural man knows not the things of the spirit’.”This doctrine allows him to dismiss any objections my natural reasons might raise to his belief in the literal truth of the Bible. If I had accepted Christ, he argued, I would see that it must all be true. How could he know, I asked, that he was himself saved? One of the difficulties of pure high Calvinism has always been that, since God alone saves for his own inscrutable reasons, neither goodness nor piety nor any other human merit can assure us of salvation But Paisley is more confident than his forebears.

“The inner witness of the Spirit is given – the Spirit gives witness to our spirit that we are the children of God.”So, in the end, even with Ian Paisley, it all seems to come down to a feeling: an assurance that is emotional as much as mental. And it is not the case that everyone who has not this feeling will go to hell. “I believe that all infants who die in infancy are atoned in the work of Christ, along with those that haven’t their proper mental abilities.”But those are the only exceptions. Catholics, of course, are damned forever, along with all Anglicans, Methodists and Christians who are less than satisfactorily fundamentalis: “Modernistic apostates are everywhere now.” And so, most probably, are you, gentle reader.None the less, he started off agreeing with a Jesuit and ended up agreeing with Monica Furlong, a feminist Anglican: “If you could explain God to me, then there is something wrong – because God is a mystery.” He may have meant this as a debating block, but I think he meant something more by it, too.As a writer, Monica Furlong has had more of her intuitions trusted than almost anyone else I talked to. Many who disagree with her about religion trust her stories about the experience of God.”What I know is mystery,” she says, “which sometimes is wonderful and ecstatic, and sometimes terrifying and awful.

I give it the name God because I don’t know what else to call it; and only in the area of religion does there seem to be a language which discusses what I’m trying to talk about.”Of course, I have had lots of ups and down, but the best moments in life were when the eternal erupted into the transitory. I am haunted by that experience: I might be happier if I could live without it. I don’t think I can.”I don’t think, for all the explanations we have been offered, that we can get closer to a sense of God than that intimation of necessary mystery. Pared down minimalism has had its day.