His wanderings in Europe were like gropings after the Divine will in the midst of the spirit’s night, often in anguish, often in tranquillity, never in his former bounding joy, always with submission, beforehand, at the moment, and afterwards.  Although the Divine Will gave a cold welcome, he sought no other refuge.

“There are a thousand things,” he writes, “that would worry me if I would only let them, but with God’s help I keep them on at arm’s length.  His grace suffices, or in His presence all the things of this world disappear.  God alone has been always the whole desire of my heart, and what else can I wish than that His will may be wholly fulfilled in me.  Having rooted everything else out of my heart, and cut me off from all things, what other desire can I have than that He who has begun the work should finish it according to His design.  It is not important that I should know what that design is; it is enough that I am in His hands, to do with me whatever He pleases.  To be and to live in His presence is all.”

And again: 

“The mind quiet both as to the past and the future, contented with the present moment:  as to the past, leaving it out of sight; as to the future, unsolicitous.  As to the present, satisfied to be outwardly homeless, cut on from all past friendships and relations.  The present gives me all the conditions required for preparation for the future.  Any time these two years past I would have made an entire renunciation of all relations to my past labors and position, but waited as a dictate of prudence.  Now I feel ready to make it with calmness and in view of all its consequences.”

“No sooner do I set my mind to pray than God fills it with Himself,” Father Hecker was once heard to say.  And this power of prayer by no means left him after 1872; only that the God who filled him was no longer revealed as the Supreme Love, but as the Supreme Majesty.  “There was once a priest,” he said, speaking of himself, “who had been very active for God, until at last God gave him a knowledge of the Divine Majesty.  After seeing the Majesty of God that priest felt very strange and was much humbled, and knew how little a thing he was in comparison with God.”  Comparison with God!  It was this that gave him, as it did Job, a terror of the Divine justice beyond words to express, and impressed that air of spiritual dejection upon him which struck his old friends as so strongly in contrast with his former happy and vivacious manners.  “You will never know,” he once said, while being helped into bed after a very sad day, “how much I have suffered till you are in heaven.”  Meantime this awful Deity, so prompt to enter Father Hecker’s mind, coming at times like a withering blast from the desert, was still the only attraction of his soul, the only object of his love.  He could no more keep his mind off God now than he could before, and now God killed him, and then He made him alive.  The ideas of the Divine goodness, patience,