st on Eugenie de Guerin's devotional practices, her happy
Christmas in the soft air of Languedoc, her midnight Mass, her beloved
Confession. On the Mass itself no one has written more sympathetically,
although he disavowed the fundamental doctrine on which the Mass is
founded. "Once admit the miracle of the 'atoning sacrifice,' once move
in this order of ideas, and what can be more natural and beautiful than
to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands
of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of
redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him?"

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
alwa