Tried by these visitations, he was free to acknowledge that in past times he had been favored above others: 

“Oh! there was a time,” he said, “when I was borne along high above nature by the grace of God, and I feared that I should die without being subject to nature, and should never feel the need of the supernatural.  But for many years now I have been left by God to my natural weakness and get nothing whatever except what I earn.”

The following words of his indicate the cleansing process of these divine influences; it is from memoranda: 

“He said to me once, after he had been for nine or ten years subject to almost unceasing desolation of spirit, ’all this suffering, though it has been excruciating, has greatly purified me and was of the last necessity to me.  Oh, how proud I was! how vain I was!  And these long years of abandonment by God have healed me.’  I think this was the only time I ever knew him to connect his sufferings with fault.  What he said may have referred to the mere temper and frame of his mind rather than to particular, specific faults.  He undoubtedly thought more highly of human nature before that desolation began than he did at the end of it.”

Meantime he used every aid for the assuagement of his interior sufferings, just as he conscientiously tried every means for the restoration of his bodily health.  Good books helped him greatly.  He recited his Breviary as he would read a new and interesting book, underlining here and there, and noting on the margins.  But during most of his time of illness his infirmities made the Divine Office impossible.  Every day he read or had read to him some parts of the Scriptures in English.  “Without the Book of Job,” he used to say, “I would have broken down completely.”  Lallemant, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Genoa, and other authors of a mystical tendency he frequently used.  But next to the Scriptures no book served him so well during his illness as Abandonment, or Entire Surrender to Divine Providence, a small posthumous treatise of Father P. J. Caussade, S.J., edited and published by Father H. Ramiere, S.J., with a strong defence of the author’s doctrine by way of preface.  At Father Hecker’s suggestion it we translated into English by Miss Ella McMahon, and has already soothed many hearts in difficulties of every kind.  It is an ingenious compendium of all spiritual wisdom, but it seemed to Father Hecker that submission to the Divine Will is taught in its pages as it has never been done since the time of the Apostles.  The little French copy which he used is thumbed all to pieces.  He used it incessantly when in great trouble of mind and knew it almost by heart.  As he read its sentences or heard them read he would ejaculate, “Ah, how sweet that is!” “Oh, what a great truth!” “Oh, that is a most consoling doctrine!” just as a man exhausted with thirst and covered with dust, as he drinks and bathes at a gushing fountain in the desert, calls out and sighs and smiles.