At Ann Arbor, Michigan, Father Hecker lectured in the Methodist meeting-house, then the largest hall in the town.  The Michigan State University, at this town, had at the time about seven hundred students, nearly all of whom came to the lecture.  The subject chosen was Luther and the Reformation. As it was announced, the audience loudly applauded Luther’s name, and some one called for three cheers for him, which were given vociferously, especially by the students.  Father Hecker smiled, waited till the noise was over, then bade them give him a fair hearing; which, of course, they did.  Before he had concluded, his audience seemed won to his view of the question in hand, and showed it by the names and the sentiments applauded.  At the end some one called out “Three cheers for Father Hecker!” and they were given most heartily.

There seems nothing like a new discovery, as we have already said, in Father Hecker’s controversial matter, or even in the method of its treatment.  But joined with its exponent, blended into his personality, as it was, by the sincerity of his conviction, it was a discovery; flavored and tinctured by him, this wayside fountain had a new life-giving power to both Catholics and non-Catholics.  Bishops, priests, and Catholic men and women in the world heard him with mute attention.  Some Catholics, it is true, were stunned by his bold handling of those traditional touch-me-nots of conservatism—­reason and liberty; and such drew off suspicious.  But multitudes of Catholics felt that he opened up to full view the dim vistas of truth towards which they had long been groping; these could agree with him without an effort.  A few had reached his stand-point before they knew him, and hailed with rapture the leader who, unlike themselves, was not kept back by either dread of novel-sounding terms or by the impotency of private station.  But here and there he met Catholics as dead-set against him as the Judaizing converts had been against his patron, St. Paul.  Their only love was for antiquity, and that they loved passionately and in all its forms, even the neo-antiquity of the controversy of the Reformation era.  On the other hand many, when they heard him, said, “That is the kind of Catholic I am, and the only kind it is easy for me to be.”  Non-Catholics, earnest men and women, were often heard to say, "If I were quite sure that Hecker is a genuine Roman Catholic I think that I could be one myself”; and this some of them did not hesitate to publish in the newspapers, so that Father Hecker might have said with Job:  “The ear that heard me blessed me, and the eye that saw me gave witness to me.”