do for a good life, with many happy examples to aid the memory, together with a strong personal affection for the holy man who showed religion to be a most happy as well as most reasonable service of God.  To his penitents in the confessional he was ever most kind and patient.  “No school of perfection,” he once said, “can equal the self-denial necessary to hear confessions well.”  God is now rewarding him, we trust, for the cheerful, often even bantering, words of encouragement he gave to the multitudes of poor sinners who knelt at his feet during the toilsome years he spent on the missions; and for the enlightenment and encouragement of his big-hearted influence, and for his trumpet notes of hope in the early morning instructions.  After the hard pounding of the night sermons it is always sought to pick the sinner up out of the dust and to hearten him by the early instructions, as well as to guide him to the precise methods and means of reform and of a good life for the future.  As to the sacrament of penance, the saying of St. Alphonsus is a maxim with us all:  “Be a lion in the pulpit, but a lamb in the confessional.”

The reader must indulge us in thus dwelling so long on the Catholic missions, for we are inclined to say many words of praise of so lovely a life, in which the same men sow and reap a great harvest in the same week, expend their vitality in preaching the word and administering the sacraments and comforting sinners who are wholly broken down with the truest contrition.

In 1851 the American Redemptorists had before them a missionary field almost untouched.  Public retreats had been given from time to time in the United States by Jesuits and others, but the mission opened at St. Joseph’s Church, New York City, on Passion Sunday, 1851, was the first mission of a regular series carried on systematically by a body of men especially devoted to the vocation.  The merit of inaugurating them is chiefly due to Father Bernard, who had no hesitation in getting to work with his three American fathers; though Father Joseph Mueller, rector of the Third Street convent, and Rev. Joseph McCarron, the rector of St. Joseph’s Church, had something to do in arranging the details and in facilitating the work.  Several Redemptorists from Third Street helped in the confessionals.*

[* Observers of coincidences will be interested to notice the arrival of the missionaries in America on St. Joseph’s day, under the Provincial Bernard Joseph Hafkenscheid, to open their first mission at St. Joseph’s Church, the pastor being Joseph McCarron, the mission having been negotiated by Joseph Mueller, the rector of the Third Street convent.  Father Hecker had a special devotion for St. Joseph.]

We have space for only the following extracts from the brief record of the missions, preserved by the fathers.  They illustrate how earnestly Father Hecker worked.  In the record of the second mission at Loretto, Pa., we find this: