arena only semi-religious, or rather in that of natural religion.  The effect was wonderfully good, though doubtless due in great measure to the manner in which his plan, so simply sketched in the letter above quoted, was developed before the audience.  The entire doubting body of intelligent men was enlisted in varying degrees in favor of the Catholic teaching of man’s relation to God and to his fellow-men, and against Protestantism.  Americans could not help feeling disgust for doctrines which were condemned by the maxims of the Declaration of Independence.

Although there was nothing positively new in the method—­something like it had been used by Archbishop Hughes against the Presbyterian champion, Breckenridge—­yet the public was taken by surprise.  The style of controversy universally in vogue was that of setting up texts of Scripture and bowling them down with other texts.  But here comes an American Catholic and arraigns Protestant doctrine at the tribunal of American liberty.  The thick-and-thin Protestant was thrown into a rage, and became abusive and often incoherent in his reply.  The easy-going Protestant claimed that the doctrines assailed were obsolete, as his church had, at least implicitly, changed them.  “Then change your church,” said Father Hecker; “if you have come back to the right doctrine, why not come back to the true Church?” As to the average intelligent inquirer, he was uniformly influenced by these lectures against the Reformation and its entire teaching, with its dreadful effects of doubt and division among Christians.

Father Hecker had an intuitive perception of the peculiar difficulties of the American people, and ever showed the utmost readiness and skill in meeting them.  He had a matchless power of laying bare the wants of the human heart, and an equal facility of pointing out the light and strength of Catholicity for their supply.  His immense sympathy for an aspiring and guileless soul deprived of the truth, was most evident; he always looked it and spoke it and acted it before his audience.  To do so was no effort on his part.  He told of the promised land not as a native of it, but as a messenger sent into it, and now returned with such tidings as should hasten the steps of his brethren still wandering in the desert; and this sympathetic interest embraced the civil as well as the religious side of human nature.  He claimed everything really American for the Catholic faith, and this was joy and gladness to many a weary heart drawn to the Church by her charities, or her beautiful symbolism, yet hindered by the phantom of absolute authority and the dread of losing the integrity of free citizenship.  Incivism—­will Catholic apologists never learn it?—­is the heaviest stone flung at the Church in all free lands to-day.  Father Hecker’s blood fairly boiled that the Church of Christ, the very home of Christian freedom, and the nursing-mother of all civil well-being, should be thus assailed, while Calvin’s and Luther’s degrading doctrines should be paraded as alone worthy of a free people.