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CHAPTER XXX

THE APOSTOLATE OF THE PRESS

ONE Sunday forenoon, happening to cross Broadway near a fashionable Protestant church, we saw the curb on both sides of the street lined with carriages, and the coachmen and footmen all reading the morning papers.  The rich master and his family were in the softly-cushioned pews indoors, while their servants studied the news of the world and worshipped at the shrine of the Press outside:  a spectacle suggestive of many things to the social reformer.  But to a religious mind it was an invitation to the Apostolate of the Press. The Philips of our day can evangelize the rough charioteer by means of the written word as easily as they can his cultured master.

To Father Hecker the Press was the highest opportunity for religion.  The only term of comparison for it is some element of nature like sunlight or the atmosphere.  In the Press civilized Man lives and breathes.  Father Hecker was as alive to the injury done to humanity by bad reading as a skilful physician is to the malaria which he can smell and fairly taste in an infected atmosphere; and he ever strove to make the Press a means of enlightenment and virtue.  He began to write for publication almost immediately after his arrival in America as a Redemptorist missionary; the Questions of the Soul and the Aspirations of Nature were composed amidst most absorbing occupations between 1853 and 1858.  Throughout life he was ever asking himself and others how the Press could be cleansed, and how its Apostolate could be inaugurated.  To this end he was ready to devote all his efforts, and expend all his resources and those of the community of which he was the founder.  It is true that no man of his time was better aware of the power of the spoken word, and few were more competent to use it, the natural and Pentecostal vehicle of the Holy Spirit to men’s souls.  But he also felt that the providence of God, in making the Press of our day an artificial medium of human intercourse more universal than the living voice itself, had pointed it out as a necessary adjunct to the oral preaching of the truth.  He was convinced that religion should make the Press its own.  He would not look upon it as an extraordinary aid, but maintained that the ordinary provision of Christian instruction for the people should ever be two-fold, by speech and by print:  neither the Preacher without the Press nor the Press without the Preacher.  He was heard to say that in reading Montalembert’s Monks of the West he had been struck with the author’s eloquent apostrophe to the spade, the instrument of civilization and Christianity for the wild hordes of the early middle ages.  Much rather, he said, should we worship the Press as the medium of the light of God to all mankind.  He felt that the Apostolate of the Press might well absorb the external vocation of the most active friends of religion.