Father Hecker felt that he was a pioneer in thus dealing with rationalized Protestants.  His eye was quick to see the signs of the breaking up of dogmatic Protestantism, and he was early out among the vast intellectual wreckage, endeavoring to catch and tow into port what fragments he could of a system founded on doubt and on the denial of human virtue and human intelligence.  “I want,” he said on one occasion in private, “to open the way to the Church to rationalists.  It seems to me to be now closed up.  I feel that I am a pioneer in opening and leading the way. I smuggled myself into the Church, and so did Brownson.”  And now he wanted to abolish the custom-house, and open the harbor wide and clear for the entrance into the Church of all men who had been forced back on reason alone for guidance.  The words above italicised were uttered with powerful emphasis and with much feeling.  He quoted the following saying of Ozanam with emphatic approval:  “What the age needs is an intellectual crusade”; and he affirmed that Leo XIII. had done very much to aid us in preaching it, and that Pius IX., rightly understood, had led the way to it.  “The Catholics I would help with my left hand, the Protestants with my right hand,” he once said.  And non-Catholics, all but the bigots, liked him, for he was frank and true by every test.  He was neither an exotic nor a hybrid, and they felt at home with him.  He much resembled the best type of public men in America who have achieved fame at the bar or in politics; indeed, as we have already intimated, he really belonged to that type, for all his studies and all his training in the Catholic schools and convents, which had given him more and more of truth, more and more of the grace of God, had not changed the kind or type of man to which he belonged.  He was the same character as when he harangued the Seventh Ward voters, or discussed the Divine Transcendence at Brook Farm.  Scholastic truth sank deep into his soul, but scholastic methods stuck on the surface and then dropped away.  “And David having girded his sword upon his armor began to try if he could walk in armor, for he was not accustomed to it.  And David said to Saul, I cannot go thus, for I am not used to it.  And he laid them off.  And he took his staff which he had always in his hands, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook.”

If his duties in the Paulist community and parish had allowed, Father Hecker could have lectured to large audiences during the greater part of the year, and been well paid for his labor.  He soon became the foremost exponent of Catholicity on the public platform in the United States.  From the close of the war till his health gave way in 1872 he was much sought after for lectures, and spoke in the different cities and very many of the large towns, besides being obliged to refuse numerous applications, constantly coming in from all parts of the Union and from all sorts of societies, secular, Catholic, and even distinctly Protestant.  Meantime he was frequently called on to preach on such occasions as the laying of corner-stones of churches and their dedications.  He also gave one of the sermons preached before the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore.