in the chief Catholic periodicals of France, Belgium, and Germany, and published by Mr. McMaster in the Freeman’s Journal. In Rome it served a good purpose.  To some its views were startling, but its tone was fresh and enlivening.  It undertook to show that the freest nation in the world was the most inviting field for the Catholic propagandist.  We suppose that the author’s main purpose in writing was but to invite attention to America, yet he so affected public opinion in Rome as to materially assist the adjustment of the difficulty pending before the high tribunals.  Cardinal Barnabo was quite urgent with Father Hecker that he should write more of the same kind, but either his occupations or his expectation of an early return home hindered his doing so.  As it was, he had caused himself and the American Fathers to be viewed by men generally through the medium of the great question of the relation of religion to the young Republic of the Western World.  That topic was fortunate in having him for its exponent.  He was an object-lesson of the aspirations of enlightened Catholic Americans as well as an exalted type of Catholic missionary zeal.  Very few men of discernment ever really knew Father Hecker but to admire him and to be ready to be persuaded by him of his life-thesis:  that a free man tends to be a good Catholic, and a free nation is the most promising field for apostolic zeal.

Soon after his arrival in Rome he made the acquaintance of George L. Brown, an American artist of some note, and a non-Catholic.  He was an earnest man, and Father Hecker attacked him at once on the score of religion, and before December had received him into the Church.  This event made quite a stir in Rome.  The city was always full of artists and their patrons, and Mr. Brown’s conversion, together with the articles in the Civilta, influenced in Father Hecker’s favor many persons whom he could not directly reach.  This was especially the case with the Pope, to whose notice such matters were brought by Archbishop Bedini, his office enabling him to approach the Holy Father at short intervals.  He exerted a similar influence on all the high officials of the Roman court.

In spite of all this favor the usual delays attendant upon serious judicial investigations oppressed Father Hecker with the heavy dread of “the law’s delay,” detaining him in Rome from the first week in September, 1857, when the case was opened in the Propaganda, till it was closed by the decision of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars early in the following March.  Nor was the “insolence of office” quite absent.  He was once heard to tell of his having been snubbed in the Pope’s antechamber by some one in attendance, and often put aside till he was vexed with many weary hours of waiting and by being compelled to repeatedly return.

“I had to wait for three days,” we read in the memoranda, “and then was reproached and scolded by the monsignor in attendance for coming late.  I had not come late but had been kept waiting outside, and I told him so.  ‘You will see those hills of Albano move,’ said I, ‘before I move from my purpose to see the Holy Father.’  When he saw my determination he changed and gave me my desired audience.”