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 G.o.d"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, G.o.d 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 sanct.i.ty. 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 a.s.sent. 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 G.o.d"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 j.a.panese.
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 trans.m.u.te 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 a.s.sailant of Protestantism who had appeared for many a day.
Father Hecker well knew that the non-Catholic American aspires to deal with G.o.d through the aid of as few exterior appliances as possible. To come near G.o.d 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 G.o.d directly, His inspired Word, His Holy Spirit. Father Hecker longed to tell his fellow-countrymen that the Catholic Church gives them a flight to G.o.d 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 cert.i.tude, 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 G.o.d is good, that men will be punished only for their personal misdeeds, that men are born for union with G.o.d 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 inst.i.tute 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 G.o.d"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 a.s.sertion has deprived it of aggressive vigor. There is less danger of its a.s.sault 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 cla.s.s 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 rect.i.tude 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sailed 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 a.s.sailed, 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 G.o.d"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 a.s.sume 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 princ.i.p.al 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 princ.i.p.al 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 mult.i.tudes 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 a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.ses 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 a.s.sailants 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 mult.i.tudes 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 pa.s.sionately 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 G.o.d, 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 ent.i.tled "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 const.i.tutes 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 a.s.sistants 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 G.o.d"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 apt.i.tude 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 Ma.s.s. 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 apt.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances, 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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CHAPTER x.x.x
THE APOSTOLATE OF THE PRESS