“On sending in our names we had not long to wait in the guest-room before the good father made his appearance.  There was a stamp of originality about him; tall in stature, not exactly what we are used to call clerical in appearance, with a thoroughly American type of face, and with the national peaked beard instead of being closely shaven as is the custom with our clergy generally.  I had met him before, without his clerical (religious) garb, on a journey on board a steamboat.  At first, I remember, I had set him down as a Yankee skipper or trader of some sort; but when by chance we got into conversation, I found him a hard-headed man, shrewd, original, and earnest in his remarks; but when our conversation turned to religious topics, and got animated, I shall never forget how all that was common and national in his physique disappeared.  And when he spoke of the mystery of God’s love for man, his countenance seemed as it were transfigured, so that I felt that an artist would not wish for a better living model from which to paint a St. Francis Xavier, making himself all things to all men amidst his shipmates on his voyage to the Indies.”

From what has been said of Father Hecker’s aptitude to win non-Catholics to hear and believe him, it should not be thought that in order to do so he was obliged to leave off any sign of his priestly character.  He was distinctly priestly in his demeanor, though, as already observed, not exactly what one would call a thorough “ecclesiastic.”  He ever dressed soberly.  When he arrived at a town on a lecture tour he always put up at the house of the resident priest, if there was one, and, if he stayed over Sunday, preached for him at High Mass.  He invariably corresponded beforehand with the pastor of the town to which he was invited by a secular lecture society, requesting him to send complimentary tickets to the leading men of the place—­lawyers, doctors, ministers, merchants, and politicians.  And when he appeared on the platform it was always in company with the priest.  He loved priests with all his might and was ever at home in their company.  It is not very singular, therefore, that some of his most devoted friends and most ardent admirers were priests, secular and religious, born and bred in the Old World—­among them some of the most prominent clergymen in the country.

Father Hecker often met non-Catholics in private, being sought out by prominent radicals, sceptics, unbelievers, and humanitarians.  What they had heard from him in public lectures, or read of him in the press, drew them to him, or they were brought to see him by mutual friends.  And here he was indeed powerful, overbearing resistance by the strength of conviction and the simple exhibition of Catholic truth.  The sight of a man anywhere, whom he could but suspect of aptitude for his views, was the signal for his emphatic affirmation of them, sometimes leading him to controversy bordering on the vociferous on cars and steamboats.  In such circumstances, and in all his other dealings with men, you saw his prompt intelligence, his fine sensibility, his lofty spirit, his forceful and occasionally imperious will to hold you to the point; but the quality which, both in public and private discourse, outshone all, or rather gave all light and direction, was an immense love of truth joined to an equal admiration for virtue.