Many years later I had to discuss the same question with Keshub Chunder Sen, the Indian Reformer. He wanted to know what kind of service should be adopted by his new church, the Brahmo Somaj; his friends thought of sermons, singing, and processions with flags and flowers through the streets. “No,” I said to him, “service of God should be service of men; if you want divine service, let it be a real service, such as God would approve of. Let other people go to church, to their mosques or their temples, but take you your own friends on certain days of the week to whatever you like to call your meeting-place, and after a short prayer or a few words of advice send some of them to the poorest streets in the city, others to the prisons, others to the hospitals. Let them pray with all who wish to pray, but let them speak words of true love and comfort also, and when they can, let them help them with their alms. That would be a real Divine Service and a divine Sunday for you, and you would all come home, it may be sadder, but certainly wiser and better men.” I am afraid he did not agree with me. He did not think that true religion was to visit the poor and the afflicted. That might do for a practical people like the English, but the Hindu wanted something else, he wanted some outward show and ceremony for the people, and at the same time some silent communion with God. Who can tell what different people understand by religion? and who can prescribe the spiritual food that is best for them? “Only,” I said, “do not call it practical to encourage millions of people to waste hours and hours in mere repetition, and to spend millions and millions in supplying this cold comfort, when next door to the magnificent cathedral there are squalid streets, and squalid houses, and squalid beds to lie and die on.” The religious and devotional element is very strong in Germany, but the churches are mostly empty. A German keeps his religion for weekdays rather than for Sunday. When the German regiments marched, and when they made ready for battle, they did not sing ribald songs, they sang the songs of Luther and Paul Gerhard, which they knew by heart and which strengthened them to face death as it ought to be faced.