“It is for this we are created:  that we may give a new and individual expression of the absolute in our own peculiar character.  As soon as the new is but the re-expression of the old, God ceases to live.  Ever the mystery is revealed in each new birth; so must it be to eternity.  The Eternal-Absolute is ever creating new forms of expressing itself.”

What the new order of things was to be in the spiritual life could be learned, Father Hecker held, by observing men’s strivings after natural good.  The tendencies which shape men’s efforts to secure happiness in this world, in so far as they are innocent, indicated to him what choice of means should be made to propagate the knowledge and love of God.  According to this, the most successful worker for a people’s sanctification will be kindred to them by conviction and by sympathy in all that concerns their political and social life.  Men’s aspirations in the natural order point out the highway of God’s representatives.  As these aspirations change from era to era, so do the main lines of religious effort change, the highways of one age becoming the byways of another.  It is true that no method for the elevation of human nature to divine union, which the Church has sanctioned, ever becomes quite obsolete, but the merest glance at the differences between the spiritual characteristics of the martyrs, the hermits, the monks, the friars, shows that one form of the Christian virtues succeeds another in general possession of men’s souls.  The new spirit, without crowding the old one off its beaten track, follows men to the new ways whither the providence of God in the natural order has led them.  “First the natural man,” says St. Paul, “and then the spiritual.”  Different types of spirituality are brought forward by Almighty God to sanctify men in new conditions of life.  Among the foremost of these are religious communities of men and women.  Hence their duty to adjust themselves, as far as faith and discipline permit, to the circumstances of the times.  The power of a religious community for good will be measured by its ability to elevate the natural to the supernatural without shocking it or thwarting it.

Now, every one knows that this age differs materially from past ones.  It differs by a wider spread of education and an uncontrollable longing after liberty, civil, political, and personal.

Father Hecker was penetrated with the belief that the intelligence and liberty, whose well-ordered enjoyment he had witnessed in America, and which he loved so deeply himself, were divine invitations to the apostolate of the Holy Spirit.  He was profoundly impressed with the certainty of the development, the extension, and the permanence of these political and social changes; and he knew that they demanded of men a personal independence of character far in advance of previous generations.  And he knew, also, that for the sanctification of such men the aids of religion, though not changed