“Peace is gained by a wise inaction, and strength by integral resignation to God, who will do all, and more than we, with the boldest imagination, can fancy or desire.”

“May you see God in all, through all, and above all.  May the Divine transcendence and the Divine immanence be the two poles of your life.”

The natural faculties of the understanding and will, whose integrity Father Hecker so much valued, were to be established in a new life infinitely above their native reach, glorified with divine life, their activity directed to the knowledge of things not even dreamed of before, and endowed with a divine gift of loving.  In this state the Holy Spirit communicates to the human faculties force to accomplish intellectual and moral feats which naturally can be accomplished by God alone.  This is called by theologians supernatural infused virtue, and is rooted in Faith, Hope, and Love, is made efficacious by spiritual gifts of wisdom and understanding, and knowledge and counsel, and other gifts and forces, the conscious and daily possession of which the Christian is entitled to hope for and strive after, and finally to obtain and enjoy in this life.

That this union is a personal relation, and that it should be a distinctly conscious one on the soul’s part, all will admit who think but a moment of the infinite, loving activity of the Spirit of God, and the natural and supernatural receptivity of the spirit of man.  Although not even the smallest germ of the supernatural life is found in nature, yet the soul of man ceaselessly, if blindly, yearns after its possession.  Once possessed, the life of God blends into our own, mingles with it and is one with it, impregnating it as magnetism does the iron of the lodestone, till the divine qualities, without suppressing nature, entirely possess it, and assert for it and over it the Divine individuality.  “Now I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”  An author much admired by Father Hecker thus describes the effects produced in the soul by supernatural faith, and hope, and love: 

“These virtues are called and in reality are Divine virtues.  They are called thus not because they are related to God in general, but because they unite us in a divine manner with God, have Him for their immediate motive, and can be produced in us only by a communication of the Divine nature. . . .  For the life that the children of God lead here upon earth must be of the same kind as the life that awaits them in heaven.” (Scheeben’s Glories of Divine Grace, p. 222; Benziger Bros.)

To partake thus of the inner life of God was Father Hecker’s one spiritual ambition, and to help others to it his one motive for dealing with men.  He was ever insisting upon the closeness of the divine union, and that it is our life brought into actual touch with God, whose supreme and essential activity must, by a law of its own existence, make itself felt, dominate as far as permitted the entire activity of the soul, and win more and more upon its life till all is won.  Then are fulfilled the Apostle’s words:  “But we all beholding the glory of the Lord with open face are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).