Mr. Wilfrid Ward, a Catholic philosophical writer of distinction, has explained in a brilliant little volume the influence upon controversy of what he styles The Clothes of Religion—­race, political traditions, education, physical temperament.  He puts into his instructive pages the sense of the great scholastic maxim, Quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur—­Whatever is received, is received according to the mode (or character) of the recipient.  The national character, the tendencies, the antecedents of the people addressed, the relative power of thought and of emotion in their mental activity; all these are not, indeed, the souls of men but the clothing of them, their armor and their weapons; and Father Hecker felt that such things must be taken into account in dealing with people, and that with the utmost discretion.  His view about controversy with non-Catholics was indeed aggressive—­that we had reached the point in the battle at which the legion, having cast its javelins, rushes on with drawn swords to closer conflict.  But the combatants should be well trained, the captains should know the ground to be traversed, should understand thoroughly the weakness and strength of the enemy.  It was not a new thing to bring Protestantism into court at the suit of human liberty.  But it was a novelty to attack Protestantism as the very torture-chamber of free and innocent souls, and to do it in such a way as to draw thousands of the best Protestants in the land to listen.  Such sentences in the morning papers as “An overflowing house greeted Father Hecker,” “The immense hall has seldom been so completely filled,” “Representative men of all creeds and of none were scattered through the large audience,” had a tremendous meaning when the lecturer was known to be the most fearless assailant of Protestantism who had appeared for many a day.

Father Hecker well knew that the non-Catholic American aspires to deal with God through the aid of as few exterior appliances as possible.  To come near God by his own spiritual activity without halting at forms of human contrivance is his spiritual ambition.  His religious joy is in a spiritual life which deals with God directly, His inspired Word, His Holy Spirit.  Father Hecker longed to tell his fellow-countrymen that the Catholic Church gives them a flight to God a thousand times more direct than they ever dreamed of.  They think that the authority of the Church will cramp their limbs; he was eager to explain to them that it sets them free, clears the mind of doubt, intensifies conviction into instinctive certitude, quickens the intellectual faculties into an activity whose force is unknown outside the Church.