Early in 1879 the Rev. F.A.  Malleson, vicar of Broughton, near Coniston, had asked him to write, for the Furness Clerical Society’s Meetings, a series of letters on the Lord’s Prayer.  In them he dwelt upon the need of living faith in the Fatherhood of God, and childlike obedience to the commands of old-fashioned religion and morality.  He criticised the English liturgy as compared with mediaeval forms of prayer; and pressed upon his hearers the strongest warnings against evasion, or explaining away of stern duties and simple faiths.  He concluded: 

“No man more than I has ever loved the place where God’s honour dwells, or yielded truer allegiance to the teaching of His evident servants.  No man at this time grieves more for the damage of the Church which supposes him her enemy, while she whispers procrastinating pax vobiscum in answer to the spurious kiss of those who would fain toll curfew over the last fires of English faith, and watch the sparrows find nest where she may lay her young, around the altars of the Lord.”

But if the Anglican Church refused him, the Roman Church was eager to claim him.  His interest in mediaevalism seemed to point him out as ripe for conversion.  Cardinal Manning, an old acquaintance, showed him special attention, and invited him to charming tete-a-tete luncheons.  It was commonly reported that he had gone over, or was going.  But two letters (of a later date) show that he was not to be caught.  To a Glasgow correspondent he wrote in 1887: 

“I shall be entirely grateful to you if you will take the trouble to contradict any news gossip of this kind, which may be disturbing the minds of any of my Scottish friends.  I was, am, and can be, only a Christian Catholic in the wide and eternal sense.  I have been that these five-and-twenty years at least.  Heaven keep me from being less as I grow older!  But I am no more likely to become a Roman Catholic than a Quaker, Evangelical, or Turk.”

To another, next year, he wrote: 

“I fear you have scarcely read enough of ‘Fors’ to know the breadth of my own creed or communion.  I gladly take the bread, water, wine, or meat of the Lord’s Supper with members of my own family or nation who obey Him, and should be equally sure it was His giving, if I were myself worthy to receive it, whether the intermediate mortal hand were the Pope’s, the Queen’s, or a hedge-side gipsy’s.”

At Coniston he was on friendly terms with Father Gibson, the Roman Catholic priest, and gave a window to the chapel, which several of the Brantwood household attended.  But though he did not go to Church, he contributed largely to the increase of the poorly-endowed curacy, and to the charities of the parish.  The religious society of the neighbourhood was hardly of a kind to attract him, unless among the religious society should be included the Thwaite, where lived the survivors of a family long settled at Coniston—­Miss