The death of Father Baker was, humanly speaking, a loss to the community beyond all calculation, and was the great event of the first period of the Paulist community.  Father Hecker had the very highest estimate of his holiness, and mourned him with the mingled sorrow and joy with which saints are mourned.  The reader should get Father Hewit’s Memoir of Father Baker if he would know his virtues.  Father Hecker was often heard to say that few men understood his ideas so clearly as did Father Baker and had so much sympathy with them.  And his death was the signal for an impulse whose power plainly indicated its supernatural origin.  Up to that time there had been but two priests added to the community, and those who had offered themselves as novices and been rejected were, as a rule, little calculated to inspire hope.  But from 1865 onwards good subjects, mostly converts, applied in sufficient numbers, and in a few years the missions were resumed.  But what was of even more importance, the apostolate of the press, started in the publication of THE CATHOLIC WORLD the month in which Father Baker’s death occurred, assumed a national prominence, and together with the Catholic Tracts and the Catholic Publication Society set the Paulists at work in their primary vocation, the conversion of non-Catholics to the true religion.  To this, and to Father Hecker’s lectures, we now turn.  Of course we might dwell longer on the parish and the missions, about which there are many things of interest left untold, but only the lapse of time can sufficiently dissociate them from living persons to allow of their being made public.

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CHAPTER XXIX

FATHER HECKER’S LECTURES

THE suspension of the missions, if it was the result of necessity, was yet an aid to Father Hecker in devoting himself to public speaking in the interests of the Catholic faith.  Between missions, it is true, he seized every favorable opportunity to address audiences on controversial topics, often doing so in public halls, as well as in churches.  Meantime he could still further mature his plans, and, testing his methods by experiment, secure for future occasions a course of lectures fully suited to the end he had in view.  More than ever did he study to fit himself for his apostolate.  How, he asked himself, shall the living word be framed anew for our new people?  How shall religious teaching be suited to the special needs of this age without detracting from the integrity and the venerable antiquity of the truth?  He sought to answer these questions by recalling his own early difficulties, and by opening his soul to the voices of struggling humanity uttered everywhere around him.  What men outside the Church were yearning for in matters social and religious was his incessant study.  He read every book, he read every periodical which promised to guide him ever so little to know