“Called by the voice of God to leave his friends, home, and country, he obeys instantly and without a murmur.  To find God and to be one with God, a solitary life in the desert was not necessary to St. Joseph.  He was in the world and found God where he was.  He sanctified his work by carrying God with him into the workshop.  St. Joseph was no flower of the desert or plant of the cloister; he found the means of perfection in the world, and consecrated it to God by making its cares and duties subservient to divine purposes.

“The house of St. Joseph was his cloister, and in the bosom of his family he practised the sublimest virtues.  While occupied with the common daily duties of life his mind was fixed on the contemplation of divine truths, thus breathing into all his actions a heavenly influence.  He attained in society and in human relationships a degree of perfection not surpassed, if equalled, by the martyr’s death, the contemplative of the solitude, the cloistered monk, or the missionary hero.

“Our age is not an age of martyrdom, nor an age of hermits, nor a monastic age.  Although it has its martyrs, its recluses, and its monastic communities, these are not, and are not likely to be, its prevailing types of Christian perfection.  Our age lives in its busy marts, in counting-rooms, in workshops, in homes, and in the varied relations that form human society, and it is into these that sanctity is to be introduced.  St. Joseph stands forth as an excellent and unsurpassed model of this type of perfection.  These duties and these opportunities must be made instrumental in sanctifying the soul.  For it is the difficulties and the hindrances that men find in their age which give the form to their character and habits, and when mastered become the means of divine grace and their titles to glory.  Indicate these, and you portray that type of sanctity in which the life of the Church will find its actual and living expression.

“This, then, is the field of conquest for the heroic Christian of our day.  Out of the cares, toils, duties, afflictions, and responsibilities of daily life are to be built the pillars of sanctity of the Stylites of our age.  This is the coming form of the triumph of Christian virtue.”

With all, moreover, Father Hecker insisted on the practice of the natural virtues, honesty, temperance, truthfulness, kindliness. courage, and manliness generally, as preceding any practical move towards the higher life.  He first explored the character and life of his penitent in search of what natural power he had, and then demanded its full exertion.  He began with the natural man, and made every supernatural force in the sacraments and prayer aid in establishing and increasing natural virtue as a necessary preliminary and ever-present accompaniment of supernatural progress.  Perhaps Father Hecker’s antipathy to Calvinism sharpened his zeal for the natural virtues, and strengthened his advocacy of human innocence.  The craving