In truth he had a strong sense, uncommon in Protestants, of Worship as distinct from Prayer—­of Worship as the special object of a religious assembly.  When he gave a Prayer-book to a child, he wrote on the flyleaf:  “We have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him.”  “In religion,” he said, “there are two parts:  the part of thought and speculation, and the part of worship and devotion....  It does not help me to think a thing more clearly, that thousands of other people are thinking the same; but it does help me to worship with more devotion, that thousands of other people are worshipping with me.  The connexion of common consent, antiquity, public establishment, long-used rites, national edifices, is everything for religious worship.”  He quotes with admiration his favourite Joubert:  “Just what makes worship impressive is its publicity, its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its observance, universally and visibly holding its sway through all the details both of our outward and of our inward life.”

“Worship,” he says, “should have in it as little as possible of what divides us, and should be as much as possible a common and public act.”

Again he quotes Joubert:  “The best prayers are those which have nothing distinct about them, and which are thus of the nature of simple adoration.”

“Catholic worship,” he said, “is likely, however modified, to survive as the general worship of Christians, because it is the worship which, in a sphere where poetry is permissible and natural, unites most of the elements of poetry.”  And again, “Unity and continuity in public religious worship are a need of human nature, an eternal aspiration of Christendom.  A Catholic Church transformed is, I believe, the Church of the future.”

His speculations on that future are interesting and, naturally, not always consistent.  In 1879 he writes to Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff:  “Perhaps we shall end our days in the tail of a return-current of popular religion, both ritual and dogmatic.”  In 1880 he sees a great future for Catholicism, which, by virtue of its superior charm and poetry, will “endure while all the Protestant sects (amongst which I do not include the Church of England) dissolve and perish.”  In 1881 he seemed to apprehend the return to Westminster Abbey, after “Wisdom’s too short reign,” of—­

    Folly revived, re-furbish’d sophistries,
    And pullulating rites externe and vain.

In the last autumn of his life he wrote to M. Fontanes—­a friend whose acquaintance he first made over St. Paul and Protestantism—­