It was not with the truths of revelation alone that Father Hecker dealt in his lectures.  The first principles of natural religion were the background of all his pictures of true Christianity:  that God is good, that men will be punished only for their personal misdeeds, that men are born for union with God and in their best moments long for Him, that they are equal, being all made in the Divine image, endowed with free will and called to the one eternal happiness—­such were the great truths with which he would impress his audience first of all, using them afterwards as terms of comparison with Protestant doctrine.  This plan he followed rather than institute a comparison of historical claims or of Biblical credentials, the well-trodden but weary road of ordinary controversy.  To him Protestantism was more an offence against the integrity of human nature than even against the truths of Christian revelation.  And he would place Catholicity in a new light, that of reason and liberty.

The revolt of Protestantism was not more against God’s external authority among men than it was against the equal brotherhood of the human race.  Well done, Luther, Father Hecker would say, well and consistently done; when you have proclaimed man totally depraved you have properly made his religion a Cain-like flight from the face of his Maker and his kindred by your doctrine of predestination.  Father Hecker deemed it plainly unwise to forego the advantages of attacking such vulnerable points as the Protestant errors of total depravity and predestination for the sake of dwelling on the Biblical and historical credentials of Church authority.  He knew, indeed, that extravagant individualism is to this day a fundamental Protestant error, but the waning power of its doctrinal assertion has deprived it of aggressive vigor.  There is less danger of its assault upon the Church, Father Hecker thought, than of its sceptical tendency upon its own adherents.  To emphasize the obligation of organic unity, in such a condition of things, was not good tactics; it was to revive the spirit of resistance without arresting the evils of doubt.  Authority in religion has high and undoubted claims; but it is nevertheless true that the normal development of man is in freedom.  Man is fitted for his destiny in proportion to his ability to use his liberty with wisdom, and Father Hecker endeavored to set non-Catholics themselves to work removing the obstacles to true spiritual liberty which Protestantism had planted in the way.

An appeal from Luther and Calvin to the standards of rational nature, to human virtue, to human equality, rather than to exclusively Catholic standards, was certain of success in a large class of minds.  And this but led to the consideration of the Church’s claims to elevate rational nature and natural virtue to that divine order which is above nature, and which is organic in the Catholic Church.  Moral rectitude is a simpler test of truth than texts from a dead book,