“Never practise any mortification of a considerable character without counsel.  The devil, when he can no longer keep us back, aims at driving us too far and too fast.”

“How can the intellect be brought under direction of divine grace except by reducing it to its nothingness?—­and how can this be done except by placing it in utter darkness?  How can the heart be filled with the spirit of divine love while it contains any other?  How can it be purified of all other inordinate love except by dryness and bitterness?  God wishes to fill our intelligence and our hearts with divine light and love, and thus to deify our whole nature—­to make us one with what we represent—­God.  And how can He do this otherwise than by removing from our soul and its faculties all that is contrary to the divine order?”

“All your difficulties are favors from God; you see them on the wrong side, and speak as the block of marble would while being chiselled by the sculptor.  When God purifies the soul, it cries out just like little children do when their faces are washed.  The soul’s attention must be withdrawn from external, created things and turned inward towards God exclusively before its union with Him; and this transformation is a great, painful, and wonderful work, and so much the more difficult and painful as the soul’s attention has been attracted and attached to transitory things—­to creatures.”

He was often heard repeating the following verse from The Imitation (book iii. chap. xxxi.), as summarizing the necessary conditions of the active life:  “Unless a man be elevated in spirit, and set at liberty from all creatures, and wholly united to God, whatever he knows and whatever he has is of no great weight.”  He wrote to a friend that he had studied that verse for thirty years and still found that he did not know all it meant.

We give what follows as characteristic of Father Hecker’s manner as a director: 

“At first, in all your deliberate actions, calm your mind, place yourself in the attitude of a receiver or listener, and then decide.  Imperceptibly and insensibly grace will guide you.”

“Don’t care what people say; keep your own counsel.  Use your own sense and abound in it; as the apostle says:  ’Let every one abound in his own sense.’  Don’t try to get anybody to agree with you.  No two noses are alike, much less souls.  God never repeats.”

“Nobody nowadays wants God.  Every one has the whole world on his shoulders, and unless his own petty ideas and schemes are adopted and succeed, he prophesies the end of the world.  You are on the right road—­push on!  Our maxim is:  Be sure you are right and then go ahead!”

“How much that is good and noble in the soul is smothered by unwise restraint!  The whole object of restraint is to reject that which is false and to correct the preference given to a lower good instead of to a higher one.  As for the rest—­freedom!