If it be permitted to speak of self, I might say that to Father Hecker I am indebted for most salutary impressions which, I sorrowfully confess, have not had in me their due effect; the remembrance of them, however, is a proof to me of the usefulness of his life, and its power for good in others.  I am glad to have the opportunity to profess publicly my gratitude to him.  He was in the prime of life and work when I was for the first time brought to observe him.  I was quite young in the ministry, and very naturally I was casting my eye around in search of ideal men, whose footsteps were treading the path I could feel I, too, ought to travel.  I never afterwards wholly lost sight of Father Hecker, watching him as well as I could from a distance of two thousand miles.  I am not to-day without some experience of men and things, won from years and toils, and I do not alter one tittle my estimate of him, except to make it higher.  To the priests of the future I recommend a serious study of Father Hecker’s life.  To them I would have his biography dedicated.  Older men, like myself, are fixed in their ways, and they will not receive from it so much benefit.

Father Hecker was the typical American priest; his were the gifts of mind and heart that go to do great work for God and for souls in America at the present time.  Those qualities, assuredly, were not lacking in him which are the necessary elements of character of the good priest and the great man in any time and place.  Those are the subsoil of priestly culture, and with the absence of them no one will succeed in America any more than elsewhere.  But suffice they do not.  There must be added, over and above, the practical intelligence and the pliability of will to understand one’s surroundings, the ground upon which he is to deploy his forces, and to adapt himself to circumstances and opportunities as Providence appoints.  I do not expect that my words, as I am here writing, will receive universal approval, and I am not at all sure that their expression would have been countenanced by the priest whose memory brings them to my lips.  I write as I think, and the responsibility must be all my own.  It is as clear to me as noon-day light that countries and peoples have each their peculiar needs and aspirations as they have their peculiar environments, and that, if we would enter into souls and control them, we must deal with them according to their conditions.  The ideal line of conduct for the priest in Assyria will be out of all measure in Mexico or Minnesota, and I doubt not that one doing fairly well in Minnesota would by similar methods set things sadly astray in Leinster or Bavaria.  The Saviour prescribed timeliness in pastoral caring.  The master of a house, He said, “bringeth forth out of his treasury new things and old,” as there is demand for one kind or the other.  The apostles of nations, from Paul before the Areopagus to Patrick upon the summit of Tara, followed no different principle.