As a priest, though he undertook to teach anybody and everybody, yet he could seldom have given the impression of desiring to impose his personal views, simply as such.  His vital perception that there can be nothing private in truth shone through his speech too plainly for so gross a misconception to be easily made by candid minds.  The fact is that the community of spiritual goods was vividly realized by him, and in good faith he credited all men with a longing like his own to see things as they really are.  As he had by nature a very kindly manner, benignant and cheerful, the average man readily submitted to his influence.  In his prime he was always a most successful and popular preacher and lecturer, from the combined effect of this earnestness of conviction and his personal magnetic quality.  Men whose mental characteristics resembled his became, soon or late, his enthusiastic disciples, and as to others, although at first some were inclined to suspect him, many of them ended by becoming his warm friends.

It is in this light that we must view the precocious efforts of the young politician.  Nothing was further from his thoughts at any time than to employ politics as a means to any private end.  Although we have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of self-indulgence.  He seems to have been ascetic by nature—­a Stoic, not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality.  The reader will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of Father Hecker’s interior life.  But we cannot leave the statement even here without explaining that we use the word ascetic in its proper sense, to connote the rightful dominance of reason over appetite, the supremacy of the higher over the lower; not the jurisdiction of the judge over the criminal.  In his case, during the greater part of his life, the adjustment of the higher and lower, the restraint he placed upon the beast in view of the elevation due to the man, was neither conceived nor felt as punitive.  We shall see later on how God finally subjected him to a discipline so corrective as to be acknowledged by him as judicial.

Isaac Hecker threw himself into public questions, then, because, being a workman, he believed he saw ways by which the working classes might be morally and socially elevated.  He wanted for his class what he wanted for himself.  To get his views into shape, to press them with all his force whenever and wherever an opportunity presented itself, was for him the inescapable consequence of that belief.  Like his great patron, St. Paul, “What wilt Thou have me to do?” was always his first question after his own illumination had been granted.  There is a note in the collection of private memoranda that has been preserved, in which, alluding to the