Hecker’s success proved that the claim of authority on the part of the Church could be established without much difficulty in men’s minds, if it were not associated with the enslavement of reason and conscience, and if shown to be consistent with rational liberty.  He insisted upon the positive view of the subject.  He proclaimed the purpose of Catholic discipline to be essentially conservative of human rights, a divinely-appointed safeguard to the liberty and enlightenment of the soul of man.  He further proclaimed that the infliction of penalties by Church authority was an accidental exercise of power provoked by disobedience to lawful authority.

Luther and the Reformation excited widespread remark, and yet to one accustomed to old-time controversy it seemed but a fragment of an argument.  The lecture proved that Luther was not an honest reformer, because, having started to reform inside the Church and as a Catholic, he finished by leaving the Church and therefore the real work of reform.  At the outset Father Hecker proved that Luther was but one, and by no means the most important one, of the great body of Catholic reformers of his time.  These set to work to remedy abuses which had grown to such an extent as to have become intolerable.  The genuine reformers, led by the Popes, went right on and did reform the Church most thoroughly, ending by the decrees of the Council of Trent.  All this the lecturer proved by citations from numerous high authorities, all of them Protestants.  Why did Luther leave the company of the true reformers? or, as Father Hecker puts it, “Why did Luther change his base?” Whatever reason he had for leaving Catholicity, it was not, as a matter of fact, on account of zeal for reform.  The lecture concluded by emphatically and, in different terms, repeatedly denying to Luther the name of Reformer and to his work the name of Reformation.  Such was the line of argument in a lecture which entertained the general public and enraged bigoted Protestants more, perhaps, than any of the others.  The secret of its success was that it overturned the great Protestant idol.

With humanitarians, rationalists, indifferentists, and sceptics Father Hecker’s lectures were popular, and such were his favorite audience.  If he so much as aroused their curiosity about the Church, he deemed that he had gained a victory; this and more than this he always succeeded in doing.  Regular “church members” he did not hope much from, though they came to hear him and he sometimes made converts even among them.  The lecture system, then far more in vogue than at present, gave him hearers from all classes of minds, and especially those most intellectually restless and inquiring.  He took his turn in the list which contained the names of Wendell Phillips, Beecher, Emerson, and Sumner, and found his golden opportunity before such audiences as had been gathered to listen to them.  Thus into the drifts of thought and into the intellectual movements