“She deeply sympathized with him through the trials and anxieties that were his in his search after truth, and when his heart found rest, and the aspirations of his soul were answered in the Holy Catholic Church, her noble heart accepted for him what she could not see for herself.  She said to a lady who spoke to her on the subject and who could not be reconciled to the conversion of a daughter:  ’No, I would not change the faith of my sons.  They have found peace and joy in the Catholic Church, and I would not by a word change their faith, if I could.’”

“She had a very earnest temperament, and what she did she did with all her heart.  The last years of her life she was a great invalid, but from her sick room she did wonders.  Family ties were kept warm, and no one whom she had loved and known was forgotten.  The poor were ever welcome, and came to her in crowds, never leaving without help and consolation.  She had a very cheerful spirit, and a bright, pleasant, and even witty word for every one.

“But the strongest trait in her character was her deeply religious nature.  With the Catholic faith it would have found expression in the religious life, as she sometimes said herself.  The faith she had made her most earnest and devout, according to her light.”

Mrs. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, who spent a month at the house in Rutgers Street just after Isaac finally returned from Brook Farm, when Mrs. Hecker was in the prime of middle life, speaks of her as “a lovely and dignified character, full of ‘humanities.’  She was fair, tall, erect, a very superior example of the German house-mother.  Hers was the controlling spirit in the house, and her wise and generous influence was felt far beyond it.  She was a life-long Methodist, and took me with her to a ‘Love Feast,’ which I had never witnessed before.”

To the good sense, good temper, and strong religious nature of Caroline Hecker her children owed, and always cordially acknowledged, a heavy, and in one respect an almost undivided, debt of gratitude.  Neither Engel Freund nor John Hecker professed any religious faith.  The latter was never in the habit of attending any place of worship.  Both were Lutheran so far as their antecedents could make them so, but neither seems to have practically known much beyond the flat negation, or at best the simple disregard, of Christianity to which Protestantism leads more or less quickly according as the logical faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it.  However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance.  The grandfather especially seems to have been a “gentle sceptic,” an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him.  He was a kindly, virtuous, warm-hearted man, with a life of his own which made him incurious and thoughtful, and singularly devoid of prejudices.  When his daughter Caroline elected to desert the Reformed Dutch Church in which the family had a pew, and to attach herself to another sect, he had only a jocular word of surprise to say concerning her odd fancy for “those noisy Methodists.”  He had a true German fondness for old ways and settled customs, and to the end of his days spoke only his own vernacular.