It may not be popular to attribute such qualities to a German. “How can you go and listen to one of these brutes?” is a remark more than once addressed to me in Cologne. But in putting on record my impressions of Germany, it is not my object to minister to race hatreds, but to describe things good and bad alike as I saw them. The riddle of the German at prayer is difficult indeed. We write him off as a brute and a materialist. Yet will our own countrymen, artisans, professional men, shopkeepers, stand for hours and listen to doctrines dealing with the first principles of faith and of the things which concern a man’s soul? What would be the feelings of the average Church of England clergyman if, instead of a thin and depressing congregation mainly composed of elderly ladies, men in the prime of life crowded out his church? For great though the reputation of Father Dionysius, there is nothing peculiar in the Dom services. Other churches are equally well attended and equally full. The atmosphere is perfectly genuine and sincere. There is nothing hypocritical about it. The people mean what they are saying at the time they say it. And then before one’s eyes rises the memory of a whole series of evil and ugly deeds--cruelty to prisoners, callousness to suffering, arrogance, brutality, a cynical disregard of the first principles which in any decent society regulate the relations between man and man. Where has the application of religion gone wrong? I have often wondered what the services in the Dom must have been during the weeks when the full agony of defeat and surrender fell upon the Germans--black hours for preacher and for congregation alike. The service at which Father Dionysius preaches on Sunday morning is a short sung mass following on High Mass. There is no choir, but the congregation themselves sing old German chorales while mass is going on. Every seat in the nave is filled nearly an hour before the service begins: to obtain standing room in the neighbourhood of the pulpit it is necessary to be there at least twenty minutes beforehand. By the time mass begins, the vast nave and side aisles of the cathedral are crowded from the doors to the altar. The effect of the thousands of voices singing the fine old German music in unison is without parallel in my experience. No act of congregational worship in which I have ever taken part can be compared with it. The music, soaring under the great vaulted roof, seems to be caught up in the forest of arches and to echo back again to earth. “Hier liegt vor Deiner Majestät Im Staub die Christenschaar, Das Herz zu Dir, o Gott, erhöht, Die Augen zum Altar.”