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The fact that we find ourselves living in Sodom should come as no surprise.

Almost a century ago to the day (April 8 1906), Lytton Strachey of Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote to Maynard Keynes, the future economist, ‘We can’t be content with telling the truth — we must tell the whole truth: and the whole truth is the Devil… It’s madness for us to dream of making dowagers understand that feelings are good, when we say in the same breath that the best ones are sodomitical … our time will come a 100 years hence.’

The Bible emphasises that its truth is never readily accepted by the human heart.

It therefore prepares us not just for physical opposition but also for varying degrees of intellectual misunderstanding and even incredulity. When Paul addresses the Athenians, they object that he is bringing them ‘strange ideas’. The same would doubtless have been true had he been preaching in India or China, America or Egypt. Having said that, it is at least arguable that a new type of incomprehension has taken hold in Europe since the 18th century and that this new mindset is almost unique in history.