FATHER HECKER'S LECTURES
THE suspension of the missions, if it was the result of necessity,
was yet an aid to Father Hecker in devoting himself to public
speaking in the interests of the Catholic faith. Between missions, it
is true, he seized every favorable opportunity to address audiences
on controversial topics, often doing so in public halls, as well as
in churches. Meantime he could still further mature his plans, and,
testing his methods by experiment, secure for future occasions a
course of lectures fully suited to the end he had in view. More than
ever did he study to fit himself for his apostolate. How, he asked
himself, shall the living word be framed anew for our new people? How
shall religious teaching be suited to the special needs of this age
without detracting from the integrity and the venerable antiquity of
the truth? He sought to answer these questions by recalling his own
early difficulties, and by opening his soul to the voices of
struggling humanity uttered everywhere around him. What men outside
the Church were yearning for in matters social and religious was his
incessant study. He read every book, he read every periodical which
promised to guide him ever so little to know by what road Divine
Providence was moving men's minds towards the truth. His eyes were
ever strained to read the signs of God's providence in men's lives.
And his conclusion was always the same: proclaim it on the house-tops
that no man can be consistent with his natural aspirations till he
has become a Catholic; preach it on the street-corners that the
Catholic religion elevates man far above his highest natural force
into union with the Deity--intimate, conscious, and perpetual.
As to systematic preparation for discourses to non-Catholics, Father
Hecker had his own peculiar equipment. As the reader will remember,
God had led him in no way more singularly than in his studies, and
had led him straight. The doctrines of the Church were familiar to
him, for they had quenched his soul's thirst. And he had preached
them on the missions, the instructions on the Creed and the
Sacraments falling to his share. He had given these waters of life to
other souls, and knew their value. He was a close student of the
dogmatic side of religion. He had, it is true, little taste for the
refinements of theologians, unless they touched the questions of
human dignity and the scope of the grace of Christ, which were vital
ones to himself. He viewed religion with wide-sweeping glances,
trying to discover every hill of vision or stream of sanctity. He had
plain truths to teach, and he needed none other. He knew the organism
of the Church in clergy and in people, for he had seen it both from
without and within. He had felt the grip of authority fixed in his
soul. He had agonized under the brand of punishment as it burnt into
his flesh, and he had seen it changed into the badge of approval.
Within and without he knew Catholicity, loved it daily more and more,
and was daily more and more anxious to proclaim it to the world.
It was not from labored preparation of his lectures that success came
to Father Hecker. Even those which seemed the most elaborately
prepared he did not write out word for word. His verbal memory was
not trustworthy, and he had to confide in his extemporizing faculty,
which was very good, and which became in course of time quite
reliable, giving out sentences clear, grammatical, and fit to print.
"I have to produce a sermon for next Sunday," he once wrote to a
friend. "For me a sermon is always a spontaneous production; I cannot
get one up. The idea must arise and grow up in my own mind. It is
usually hard labor for me to produce it outwardly and give it
suitable expression." But the effort did not appear in the delivery,
for his style, although emphatic, was easy and familiar; his
delivery, if not altogether according to the rules of elocution,
nevertheless gained his point completely. No word of his was
dead-born. His voice was not always clear, as he often suffered from
bronchial troubles, but it was not unpleasant, and had a penetrating
quality, being of that middle pitch which carries to the ends of a
large auditorium without provoking the echoes. His appearance was
very dignified, his tall frame, his broad face and large features
showing with striking effect. His action was simple and not
ungraceful, though frequently exceedingly energetic. As he never
sought emotional effects his power may be known by his unfailing
success in holding his audience perfectly attentive throughout long
argumentative discourses. Energy of conviction was one of the
strongest forces he possessed, and it took the shape of a gentle
constraint with which his positive utterances of Catholic principles
compelled assent. Sincerity of belief and liberty of soul were
admirably blended in his manner. He never appeared in public without
attracting many representatives of the mottled sectarianism of our
population; and this pleased him much, for he loved them, felt at
home with them, and was full of joy at the opportunity of addressing
them.
He was chagrined at the apathy he sometimes met with among Catholics
concerning the American apostolate. He found priests who would devote
much labor to collecting money for the propagation of the faith among
distant heathen races, but very few who would make a serious effort
for the conversion of their American fellow-citizens. Are Americans
of less worth in God's eyes than pagans and Buddhists? he would ask.
He thought no differently of the people of the United States than St.
Paul did of the Corinthians and Macedonians, groaning and travailing
with them to bring them forth members of Christ; or than St. Francis
Xavier did of the Japanese.
If asked how he was going to convert people, he would answer: "I am a
Catholic, and I know that I am right. I can prove that I am right.
What more do I want than this, and honest men and women who will
listen to me?" The confidence he had in the strength of the Catholic
argument was absolute, and this he showed by his zeal. His sole study
was how to transmute this force into missionary form. Of all the
wonders of the intellectual world he felt that the greatest is the
faith of Catholics, and he knew by the lesson of his early life that
it is but slightly appreciated by the non-Catholic mind. That
Catholics permit this ignorance to continue was a puzzle to him. And
it was all the more annoying because any single one of them can
multiply his influence indefinitely by his union with the most
perfect organism ever known--the Catholic Church. The quiescence of a
body of men, sincere and intelligent, infallibly certain of the means
of obtaining eternal happiness, living in daily contact with other
men ignorant and _inquiring_ about this unspeakable privilege, and
yet not taking instant measures to impart their knowledge, was to
Father Hecker almost as great a wonder as the divine gift of faith
itself, especially as Catholics are well furnished with leaders and
are organized to spread the truth as one of their most sacred duties.
Mr. Wilfrid Ward, a Catholic philosophical writer of distinction, has
explained in a brilliant little volume the influence upon controversy
of what he styles _The Clothes of Religion_--race, political
traditions, education, physical temperament. He puts into his
instructive pages the sense of the great scholastic maxim, _Quidquid
recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur_--Whatever is
received, is received according to the mode (or character) of the
recipient. The national character, the tendencies, the antecedents of
the people addressed, the relative power of thought and of emotion in
their mental activity; all these are not, indeed, the souls of men
but the clothing of them, their armor and their weapons; and Father
Hecker felt that such things must be taken into account in dealing
with people, and that with the utmost discretion. His view about
controversy with non-Catholics was indeed aggressive--that we had
reached the point in the battle at which the legion, having cast its
javelins, rushes on with drawn swords to closer conflict. But the
combatants should be well trained, the captains should know the
ground to be traversed, should understand thoroughly the weakness and
strength of the enemy. It was not a new thing to bring Protestantism
into court at the suit of human liberty. But it was a novelty to
attack Protestantism as the very torture-chamber of free and
innocent souls, and to do it in such a way as to draw thousands of
the best Protestants in the land to listen. Such sentences in the
morning papers as "An overflowing house greeted Father Hecker," "The
immense hall has seldom been so completely filled," "Representative
men of all creeds and of none were scattered through the large
audience," had a tremendous meaning when the lecturer was known to be
the most fearless assailant of Protestantism who had appeared for
many a day.
Father Hecker well knew that the non-Catholic American aspires to
deal with God through the aid of as few exterior appliances as
possible. To come near God by his own spiritual activity without
halting at forms of human contrivance is his spiritual ambition. His
religious joy is in a spiritual life which deals with God directly,
His inspired Word, His Holy Spirit. Father Hecker longed to tell his
fellow-countrymen that the Catholic Church gives them a flight to God
a thousand times more direct than they ever dreamed of. They think
that the authority of the Church will cramp their limbs; he was eager
to explain to them that it sets them free, clears the mind of doubt,
intensifies conviction into instinctive certitude, quickens the
intellectual faculties into an activity whose force is unknown
outside the Church.
It was not with the truths of revelation alone that Father Hecker
dealt in his lectures. The first principles of natural religion were
the background of all his pictures of true Christianity: that God is
good, that men will be punished only for their personal misdeeds,
that men are born for union with God and in their best moments long
for Him, that they are equal, being all made in the Divine image,
endowed with free will and called to the one eternal happiness--such
were the great truths with which he would impress his audience first
of all, using them afterwards as terms of comparison with Protestant
doctrine. This plan he followed rather than institute a comparison of
historical claims or of Biblical credentials, the well-trodden but
weary road of ordinary controversy. To him Protestantism was more an
offence against the integrity of human nature than even against the
truths of Christian revelation. And he would place Catholicity in a
new light, that of reason and liberty.
The revolt of Protestantism was not more against God's external
authority among men than it was against the equal brotherhood of the
human race. Well done, Luther, Father Hecker would say, well and
consistently done; when you have proclaimed man totally depraved you
have properly made his religion a Cain-like flight from the face of
his Maker and his kindred by your doctrine of predestination. Father
Hecker deemed it plainly unwise to forego the advantages of attacking
such vulnerable points as the Protestant errors of total depravity
and predestination for the sake of dwelling on the Biblical and
historical credentials of Church authority. He knew, indeed, that
extravagant individualism is to this day a fundamental Protestant
error, but the waning power of its doctrinal assertion has deprived
it of aggressive vigor. There is less danger of its assault upon the
Church, Father Hecker thought, than of its sceptical tendency upon
its own adherents. To emphasize the obligation of organic unity, in
such a condition of things, was not good tactics; it was to revive
the spirit of resistance without arresting the evils of doubt.
Authority in religion has high and undoubted claims; but it is
nevertheless true that the normal development of man is in freedom.
Man is fitted for his destiny in proportion to his ability to use his
liberty with wisdom, and Father Hecker endeavored to set
non-Catholics themselves to work removing the obstacles to true
spiritual liberty which Protestantism had planted in the way.
An appeal from Luther and Calvin to the standards of rational nature,
to human virtue, to human equality, rather than to exclusively
Catholic standards, was certain of success in a large class of minds.
And this but led to the consideration of the Church's claims to
elevate rational nature and natural virtue to that divine order which
is above nature, and which is organic in the Catholic Church. Moral
rectitude is a simpler test of truth than texts from a dead book,
whose original tongues and whose perplexed exegesis are quite unknown
to the vast mass of mankind. And Father Hecker recognized that the
elementary truths of reason and the aspirations of humanity for
better things are not unknown to any man or woman; these are
everybody's personal means of testing truth. To pass them by in order
to apply the remoter test of revelation is either to admit that
Protestantism is not against the dictates of reason and man's
aspirations, or to commence the argument against it at the wrong end.
In a letter to Cardinal Barnabo written in July, 1863, Father Hecker
gives an account of how he went to work to secure and interest a
non-Catholic audience:
"For several years past it has seemed to me that some more effectual
means should be taken to reach the Protestant community. This last
winter I ventured with this view upon an experiment. In three
different cities I gave, in a large public hall, a course of
conferences on religion, one every evening from Sunday to Sunday
inclusive. The expense of the hall was paid by the priest of the
place, the lectures were all free, and addressed exclusively to
Protestants. The halls were crowded at each place, and that my
audiences might be such as I desired to address, I begged Catholics
to stay away. At the close of one of my lectures there were present
twenty-five hundred persons, chiefly Protestants.
"My method was as follows: In treating any doctrine of our holy faith
with a view to convincing my audience, I considered first what want
in our nature it was related to, and to which it addressed itself.
This want being discovered, I developed and illustrated it until my
hearers were fully convinced of its existence and importance. Then
the question came up, Which religion recognizes this element or want
of our nature, and meets all its legitimate demands? Does
Protestantism? Its answers were given, and found either hostile or
incomplete. Then the Catholic Church was interrogated: and she was
found to recognize this want, and her answers adequate and
satisfactory. These answers were then shown to be supported by the
authority of Holy Scriptures.
"The interest shown by my audience was remarkable, and the effect of
this method was equal to my hopes. My experience convinces me that,
if this work were continued, it would prepare the way for a great
change of religion in this country, more particularly at the present
time, when the public mind is favorably disposed to consider the
claims of the Catholic Church."
The "want in our nature" appealed to was often in the political
order, such as the love of liberty or man's capacity for
self-government. This he dwelt upon at considerable length in the
opening part of his lecture, viewing it as a philosopher would, and
extending its application, as far as possible, to men generally. He
thus chose his criterion for comparison of the two claimants in the
religious world. His triumph was, therefore, often in an arena only
semi-religious, or rather in that of natural religion. The effect was
wonderfully good, though doubtless due in great measure to the manner
in which his plan, so simply sketched in the letter above quoted, was
developed before the audience. The entire doubting body of
intelligent men was enlisted in varying degrees in favor of the
Catholic teaching of man's relation to God and to his fellow-men, and
against Protestantism. Americans could not help feeling disgust for
doctrines which were condemned by the maxims of the Declaration of
Independence.
Although there was nothing positively new in the method--something
like it had been used by Archbishop Hughes against the Presbyterian
champion, Breckenridge--yet the public was taken by surprise. The
style of controversy universally in vogue was that of setting up
texts of Scripture and bowling them down with other texts. But here
comes an American Catholic and arraigns Protestant doctrine at the
tribunal of American liberty. The thick-and-thin Protestant was
thrown into a rage, and became abusive and often incoherent in his
reply. The easy-going Protestant claimed that the doctrines assailed
were obsolete, as his church had, at least implicitly, changed them.
"Then change your church," said Father Hecker; "if you have come back
to the right doctrine, why not come back to the true Church?" As to
the average intelligent inquirer, he was uniformly influenced by
these lectures against the Reformation and its entire teaching, with
its dreadful effects of doubt and division among Christians.
Father Hecker had an intuitive perception of the peculiar
difficulties of the American people, and ever showed the utmost
readiness and skill in meeting them. He had a matchless power of
laying bare the wants of the human heart, and an equal facility of
pointing out the light and strength of Catholicity for their supply.
His immense sympathy for an aspiring and guileless soul deprived of
the truth, was most evident; he always looked it and spoke it and
acted it before his audience. To do so was no effort on his part. He
told of the promised land not as a native of it, but as a messenger
sent into it, and now returned with such tidings as should hasten the
steps of his brethren still wandering in the desert; and this
sympathetic interest embraced the civil as well as the religious side
of human nature. He claimed everything really American for the
Catholic faith, and this was joy and gladness to many a weary heart
drawn to the Church by her charities, or her beautiful symbolism, yet
hindered by the phantom of absolute authority and the dread of losing
the integrity of free citizenship. Incivism--will Catholic apologists
never learn it?--is the heaviest stone flung at the Church in all
free lands to-day. Father Hecker's blood fairly boiled that the
Church of Christ, the very home of Christian freedom, and the
nursing-mother of all civil well-being, should be thus assailed,
while Calvin's and Luther's degrading doctrines should be paraded as
alone worthy of a free people.
To say that Father Hecker "Americanized" in the narrow sense would be
to do him injustice. The American ideas to which he appealed he knew
to be God's will for all civilized peoples of our time. If
fundamentally American they were not for that reason exclusively
American. His Americanism is so broad that by a change of place it
can be made Spanish, or German; and a slight change of terms makes it
religious and Catholic. Nor had form of government essentially to do
with it; human equality cannot be monopolized by republics; it can be
rightly understood in a monarchy, though in such a ease it does not
assume the conspicuous place which it does in a republic. It was this
broadness of Father Hecker's Americanism that made him acceptable to
the extremely conservative circles of Rome, in his struggle there in
the winter of 1858-9. Many men in the monarchies of the old World may
doubt the advent of republicanism there, but what sensible man
anywhere doubts the aspiration of all races towards liberty and
intelligence?
Father Hecker's repertory covered the entire ground between
scepticism and Catholicism. In refutation of Protestantism the
principal lectures were: _The Church and the Republic; Luther and the
Reformation; How and Why I Became a Catholic, or A Search after
Rational Christianity;_ and _The State of Religion in the United
States._ On the positive side his chief topics were: The Church as a
Society, Why We Invoke the Saints, and the Sacraments of Penance and
Holy Communion. Others he had against materialism, spiritualism, etc.
As may naturally be supposed, some of his lectures succeeded better
than others. One of those he personally preferred was _The Churrk and
the Republic._ He opened by affirming, as the fundamental principle
of the American nation, that man is naturally virtuous enough to be
capable of self-government. He developed this in various ways till
his audience felt that it was to be the touchstone of the question
between the churches. He then exhibited the Protestant teaching on
human virtue and human depravity, quoting extensively from Luther and
from Calvin, as well as from the creeds of the principal Protestant
sects, until the contrast between their teaching and the fundamental
American principle was painfully vivid. There was no escape;
doctrinal Protestantism is un-American. He then gave the Catholic
doctrine of free will, of merit, of human dignity, and of the
equality of men and human brotherhood. The impression was profound.
Great mountains of prejudice were lifted up and cast into the sea.
The elevating influences of the Church's faith fixed men's eyes and
won their hearts. To have it demonstrated that Catholicity was not a
gigantic effort to combine all available human forces to maintain a
central religious despotism in the hands of a hierarchy, was a
surprise to multitudes of Protestants. To not a few intelligent
Catholics the style of argument was a great novelty. Father Hecker's
success proved that the claim of authority on the part of the Church
could be established without much difficulty in men's minds, if it
were not associated with the enslavement of reason and conscience,
and if shown to be consistent with rational liberty. He insisted upon
the positive view of the subject. He proclaimed the purpose of
Catholic discipline to be essentially conservative of human rights, a
divinely-appointed safeguard to the liberty and enlightenment of the
soul of man. He further proclaimed that the infliction of penalties
by Church authority was an accidental exercise of power provoked by
disobedience to lawful authority.
_Luther and the Reformation_ excited widespread remark, and yet to
one accustomed to old-time controversy it seemed but a fragment of an
argument. The lecture proved that Luther was not an honest reformer,
because, having started to reform inside the Church and as a
Catholic, he finished by leaving the Church and therefore the real
work of reform. At the outset Father Hecker proved that Luther was
but one, and by no means the most important one, of the great body of
Catholic reformers of his time. These set to work to remedy abuses
which had grown to such an extent as to have become intolerable. The
genuine reformers, led by the Popes, went right on and did reform the
Church most thoroughly, ending by the decrees of the Council of
Trent. All this the lecturer proved by citations from numerous high
authorities, all of them Protestants. Why did Luther leave the
company of the true reformers? or, as Father Hecker puts it, "Why did
Luther change his base?" Whatever reason he had for leaving
Catholicity, it was not, as a matter of fact, on account of zeal for
reform. The lecture concluded by emphatically and, in different
terms, repeatedly denying to Luther the name of Reformer and to his
work the name of Reformation. Such was the line of argument in a
lecture which entertained the general public and enraged bigoted
Protestants more, perhaps, than any of the others. The secret of its
success was that it overturned the great Protestant idol.
With humanitarians, rationalists, indifferentists, and sceptics
Father Hecker's lectures were popular, and such were his favorite
audience. If he so much as aroused their curiosity about the Church,
he deemed that he had gained a victory; this and more than this he
always succeeded in doing. Regular "church members" he did not hope
much from, though they came to hear him and he sometimes made
converts even among them. The lecture system, then far more in vogue
than at present, gave him hearers from all classes of minds, and
especially those most intellectually restless and inquiring. He took
his turn in the list which contained the names of Wendell Phillips,
Beecher, Emerson, and Sumner, and found his golden opportunity before
such audiences as had been gathered to listen to them. Thus into the
drifts of thought and into the intellectual movements around him,
into the daily and periodical press, into the social and political
and scientific groupings of men and women, his lectures enabled him
to breathe the peremptory call of the true religion, sure to provoke
inquiry in all active minds, and in some to find good soil and bear
the harvest of conversion. He searched for earnest souls; and his
confidence that they were everywhere to be found was rewarded not
only in many particular instances, but also by the removal of much
prejudice throughout the entire country.
The writer of these pages saw Father Hecker for the first time on the
lecture platform. He was then in the full tide of success, conscious
of his opportunity and of his power to profit by it. We never can
forget how distinctly American was the impression of his personality.
We had heard the nation's greatest men then living, and their type
was too familiar to be successfully counterfeited. Father Hecker was
so plainly a great man of that type, so evidently an outgrowth of our
institutions, that he stamped American on every Catholic argument he
proposed. Nor was the force of this peculiar impression lessened by
the whispered grumblings of a few petty minds among Catholics
themselves, to whom this apostolic trait was cause for suspicion.
Never was a man more Catholic than Father Hecker, simply, calmly,
joyfully, entirely Catholic. What better proof of this than the rage
into which his lectures and writings threw the outright enemies of
the Church? Grave ministers lost their balance and foamed at him as a
trickster and a hypocrite, all the worse because double-dyed with
pretence of love of country.
For the Protestant pulpits felt the shock and stormed in unison
against this new exposition of Catholicity and against its
representative. In some cases, not content with one onslaught, they
returned to the charge Sunday after Sunday. All this was not
unexpected. The secular press, however, were very generally favorable
in their notices, excepting some of the Boston dailies. As a rule,
the lectures were very fully reported and sometimes appeared word for
word.
To reply to one's assailants after one has left the field of battle
is no easy matter, and for the most part Father Hecker trusted for
this to local champions of Catholicity; and not in vain. But it
happened on one occasion that after he had lectured in a large town
in Michigan, and had journeyed on to fulfil engagements farther West,
he was attacked in a public hall by a minister of the place. On his
return East Father Hecker stopped over and gave another lecture in
the town, and not only refuted the minister but covered him with
ridicule. In fact there was no great need of defence of Father
Hecker's arguments, they were so simply true and so readily
understood. Not one of his antagonists compared well with him for
frankness, good humor, courtesy; and they almost invariably shirked
the issue and confined themselves to stale calumnies against the
Church.
At Ann Arbor, Michigan, Father Hecker lectured in the Methodist
meeting-house, then the largest hall in the town. The Michigan State
University, at this town, had at the time about seven hundred
students, nearly all of whom came to the lecture. The subject chosen
was _Luther and the Reformation._ As it was announced, the audience
loudly applauded Luther's name, and some one called for three cheers
for him, which were given vociferously, especially by the students.
Father Hecker smiled, waited till the noise was over, then bade them
give him a fair hearing; which, of course, they did. Before he had
concluded, his audience seemed won to his view of the question in
hand, and showed it by the names and the sentiments applauded. At the
end some one called out "Three cheers for Father Hecker!" and they
were given most heartily.
There seems nothing like a new discovery, as we have already said, in
Father Hecker's controversial matter, or even in the method of its
treatment. But joined with its exponent, blended into his
personality, as it was, by the sincerity of his conviction, it was a
discovery; flavored and tinctured by him, this wayside fountain had a
new life-giving power to both Catholics and non-Catholics. Bishops,
priests, and Catholic men and women in the world heard him with mute
attention. Some Catholics, it is true, were stunned by his bold
handling of those traditional touch-me-nots of conservatism--reason
and liberty; and such drew off suspicious. But multitudes of
Catholics felt that he opened up to full view the dim vistas of truth
towards which they had long been groping; these could agree with him
without an effort. A few had reached his stand-point before they knew
him, and hailed with rapture the leader who, unlike themselves, was
not kept back by either dread of novel-sounding terms or by the
impotency of private station. But here and there he met Catholics as
dead-set against him as the Judaizing converts had been against his
patron, St. Paul. Their only love was for antiquity, and that they
loved passionately and in all its forms, even the neo-antiquity of
the controversy of the Reformation era. On the other hand many, when
they heard him, said, "That is the kind of Catholic I am, and the
only kind it is easy for me to be." Non-Catholics, earnest men and
women, were often heard to say, _"If I were quite sure that Hecker is
a genuine Roman Catholic_ I think that I could be one myself"; and
this some of them did not hesitate to publish in the newspapers, so
that Father Hecker might have said with Job: "The ear that heard me
blessed me, and the eye that saw me gave witness to me."
Father Hecker felt that he was a pioneer in thus dealing with
rationalized Protestants. His eye was quick to see the signs of the
breaking up of dogmatic Protestantism, and he was early out among the
vast intellectual wreckage, endeavoring to catch and tow into port
what fragments he could of a system founded on doubt and on the
denial of human virtue and human intelligence. "I want," he said on
one occasion in private, "to open the way to the Church to
rationalists. It seems to me to be now closed up. I feel that I am a
pioneer in opening and leading the way. _I smuggled myself into the
Church,_ and so did Brownson." And now he wanted to abolish the
custom-house, and open the harbor wide and clear for the entrance
into the Church of all men who had been forced back on reason alone
for guidance. The words above italicised were uttered with powerful
emphasis and with much feeling. He quoted the following saying of
Ozanam with emphatic approval: "What the age needs is an
intellectual crusade"; and he affirmed that Leo XIII. had done very
much to aid us in preaching it, and that Pius IX., rightly
understood, had led the way to it. "The Catholics I would help with
my left hand, the Protestants with my right hand," he once said. And
non-Catholics, all but the bigots, liked him, for he was frank and
true by every test. He was neither an exotic nor a hybrid, and they
felt at home with him. He much resembled the best type of public men
in America who have achieved fame at the bar or in politics; indeed,
as we have already intimated, he really belonged to that type, for
all his studies and all his training in the Catholic schools and
convents, which had given him more and more of truth, more and more
of the grace of God, had not changed the kind or type of man to which
he belonged. He was the same character as when he harangued the
Seventh Ward voters, or discussed the Divine Transcendence at Brook
Farm. Scholastic truth sank deep into his soul, but scholastic
methods stuck on the surface and then dropped away. "And David having
girded his sword upon his armor began to try if he could walk in
armor, for he was not accustomed to it. And David said to Saul, I
cannot go thus, for I am not used to it. And he laid them off. And he
took his staff which he had always in his hands, and chose him five
smooth stones out of the brook."
If his duties in the Paulist community and parish had allowed, Father
Hecker could have lectured to large audiences during the greater part
of the year, and been well paid for his labor. He soon became the
foremost exponent of Catholicity on the public platform in the United
States. From the close of the war till his health gave way in 1872 he
was much sought after for lectures, and spoke in the different cities
and very many of the large towns, besides being obliged to refuse
numerous applications, constantly coming in from all parts of the
Union and from all sorts of societies, secular, Catholic, and even
distinctly Protestant. Meantime he was frequently called on to preach
on such occasions as the laying of corner-stones of churches and
their dedications. He also gave one of the sermons preached before
the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore.
The following is the introductory paragraph of a long character
sketch of Father Hecker from the pen of James Parton, the historian.
It is taken from an article entitled "Our Roman Catholic Brethren,"
published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for April and May, 1868. The
entire article is full of admiration for the Catholic Church and of
yearning towards her, though written by a typical sceptic of this era:
"As usual with them [Catholics] it is one man who is working this new
and most effective idea [the Catholic Publication Society]; but, as
usual with them also, this one man is working by and through an
_organization_ which multiplies his force one hundred times and
constitutes him a person of national importance. Readers who take
note of the really important things transpiring around them will know
at once that the individual referred to is Father Hecker, Superior of
the Community of the Paulists, in New York. . . . It is he [Father
Hecker] who is putting American machinery into the ancient ark and
getting ready to run her by steam. Here, for once, is a happy
man--happy in his faith and in his work--_sure_ that in spreading
abroad the knowledge of the true Catholic doctrine he is doing the
best thing possible for his native land. A tall, healthy-looking,
robust, handsome, cheerful gentleman of forty-five, endowed with a
particular talent for winning confidence and regard, which talent has
been improved by many years of active exercise. It is a particular
pleasure to meet with any one, at such a time as this, whose work
perfectly satisfies his conscience, his benevolence, and his pride,
and who is doing that work in the most favorable circumstances, and
with the best co-operation. Imagine a benevolent physician in a
populous hospital, who has in his office the medicine which he is
perfectly certain will cure or mitigate every case, provided only he
can get it taken, and who is surrounded with a corps of able and
zealous assistants to aid him in persuading the patients to take it!"
Mr. Parton having given us a picture of Father Hecker as he appeared
to Protestants, the following exhibits him as Catholics saw him. It
is an extract from Father Lockhart's clever book, _The Old Religion;_
the original of Father Dilke is Father Hecker:
"The day after our last conversation, having an introduction to the
Superior of the ---- Fathers in New York, my friends agreed to
accompany me. I was particularly glad of this because Father Dilke
was one of the most remarkable men of our Church in the States.
Himself a convert, and a man of large views and great sympathies, no
one was better able to enter into the scruples and difficulties of
religious Protestants on their first contact with Catholic doctrines
and Catholic worship.
"On sending in our names we had not long to wait in the guest-room
before the good father made his appearance. There was a stamp of
originality about him; tall in stature, not exactly what we are used
to call clerical in appearance, with a thoroughly American type of
face, and with the national peaked beard instead of being closely
shaven as is the custom with our clergy generally. I had met him
before, without his clerical (religious) garb, on a journey on board
a steamboat. At first, I remember, I had set him down as a Yankee
skipper or trader of some sort; but when by chance we got into
conversation, I found him a hard-headed man, shrewd, original, and
earnest in his remarks; but when our conversation turned to religious
topics, and got animated, I shall never forget how all that was
common and national in his physique disappeared. And when he spoke of
the mystery of God's love for man, his countenance seemed as it were
transfigured, so that I felt that an artist would not wish for a
better living model from which to paint a St. Francis Xavier, making
himself all things to all men amidst his shipmates on his voyage to
the Indies."
From what has been said of Father Hecker's aptitude to win
non-Catholics to hear and believe him, it should not be thought that
in order to do so he was obliged to leave off any sign of his
priestly character. He was distinctly priestly in his demeanor,
though, as already observed, not exactly what one would call a
thorough "ecclesiastic." He ever dressed soberly. When he arrived at
a town on a lecture tour he always put up at the house of the
resident priest, if there was one, and, if he stayed over Sunday,
preached for him at High Mass. He invariably corresponded beforehand
with the pastor of the town to which he was invited by a secular
lecture society, requesting him to send complimentary tickets to the
leading men of the place--lawyers, doctors, ministers, merchants, and
politicians. And when he appeared on the platform it was always in
company with the priest. He loved priests with all his might and was
ever at home in their company. It is not very singular, therefore,
that some of his most devoted friends and most ardent admirers were
priests, secular and religious, born and bred in the Old World--among
them some of the most prominent clergymen in the country.
Father Hecker often met non-Catholics in private, being sought out by
prominent radicals, sceptics, unbelievers, and humanitarians. What
they had heard from him in public lectures, or read of him in the
press, drew them to him, or they were brought to see him by mutual
friends. And here he was indeed powerful, overbearing resistance by
the strength of conviction and the simple exhibition of Catholic
truth. The sight of a man anywhere, whom he could but suspect of
aptitude for his views, was the signal for his emphatic affirmation
of them, sometimes leading him to controversy bordering on the
vociferous on cars and steamboats. In such circumstances, and in all
his other dealings with men, you saw his prompt intelligence, his
fine sensibility, his lofty spirit, his forceful and occasionally
imperious will to hold you to the point; but the quality which, both
in public and private discourse, outshone all, or rather gave all
light and direction, was an immense love of truth joined to an equal
admiration for virtue.
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