It must have taken more than ordinary penetration to perceive anything but a kind of grandiose folly in Brother Hecker.  The impulse to talk about the conversion of America, to plan it and advocate it, to proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible.  This he did with an air of matured conviction and with the impact of conscious moral authority, but in terms as strikingly eccentric as the thoughts were lofty and inspiring, and in execrable French, the declaimer being known as minus habens in his studies and utterly incapable.  All this was the very make-up of folly; and Brother Hecker was no doubt thought a fool.  But how holy a fool he was his superiors soon discovered.  We find the following among the memoranda: 

“Pere L’hoir was my superior in the studentate.  He was a holy man and a good friend, but he was surprised at my state of prayer.  He asked me how it could happen that I, a convert of only a few years, should have a state of prayer he had not attained though in the Church all his life and striving for perfection.  I told him that it was God’s will to set apart some men for a certain work and specially prepare them for it, and cause them, as He had me, to be brought under the influence of special Divine graces from boyhood.  L’hoir then began to send anybody with difficulties to me, and God gave me grace to settle them.  Then murmurs arose that he was too much under my influence, and he was removed from his position over the studies.  But afterwards they replaced him; he was very efficient in his place.”

The confidence of his superiors in Brother Hecker was shown by their causing him to receive tonsure and minor orders at the end of his first year at Wittem, though he had made no progress whatever in his studies.

The following notes are found in the memoranda: 

“The time in my whole life when I felt I had gained the greatest victory by self-exertion was when, after weeks of labor, I was able to recite the Pater Noster in Latin.

“My memory finally failed me in my studies to that degree that at last I took all my books up-stairs to the library and told the prefect of studies I could do no more to acquire knowledge by study.

“Question. How long were you unable to study? Answer. Two years in Holland and one year in England.  I never went to class those years.  I was a kind of a scandal, of course, in the house.  When I got a lucid interval of memory I studied, though much of the time I hadn’t a book in my room.  Yet, when they came to ordain me, I knew enough and was sent at once to the work of the ministry.”