Though anything but an ill-tempered man, Father Hecker was yet by nature ardent and irascible and quickly provoked by opposition, but God gave him such a horror of dissension that he would not quarrel, though it was often plain that his peaceful words cost him a hard struggle.  Occasionally he lost his temper for a little while, and this was when compelled to attend to business under stress of great bodily or mental pain.  We do not think that he was ever known to attempt to move men by anger, or even sternness.  “If you ever tell any one about me,” he said, “say that I believed in praising men more than in condemning them, and that I valued praise as a higher form of influence than any kind of threatening or compulsion.”  Nor did he resort to the formalities of obedience to secure his end.  “Why don’t you put me under obedience to do this?” asked a father who did not exactly approve of a proposal Father Hecker had made to him.  The answer was given with a good deal of heat:  “I have never done such a thing in my life, and I am not going to begin now!” Nor had he any use for bitter speech even in cold blood.  “One thing,” he said in a letter, “I will now correct; a sneer—­intentionally or consciously—­ is a thing that, so far as my memory serves, I am as innocent of as a little babe.”  Yet he could be sarcastic, as the following memorandum shows:  “Cardinal Cullen once said to me, after I had made a journey through Ireland, ‘Well, Father Hecker, what do you think of Ireland?’ I answered:  ’Your Eminence, my thoughts about Ireland are such that I will get out of the country as soon as I can; for if I expressed my sentiments I should soon be put into jail for Fenianism!’” This was in 1867 while Fenianism was rampant.  Of course he did not approve of it, but the sights he saw taught him its awful provocation.  And once when unduly pressed with the dictum of an author whose range of power was not high enough to overcome Father Hecker’s objections, he said:  “I am not content to live to be the echo of dead men’s thoughts.”  But it was not by skill in the thrust and parry of argumentative fence that Father Hecker won his way in a discussion, but by the hard drive of a great principle.  The following memorandum describes the effect of this on an ordinary man: 

“It is rather amusing when Father Hecker asks me some of his stunning questions on the deepest topics of the divine sciences.  I look blank at him, I ask him to explain, I fish up some stale commonplace from the memory of my studies—­and he then gives me his own original, his luminous answer.”

And both his choice of subjects in conversation and his natural manner were according to his temperament, which was meditative.  This gave his countenance when at rest a peaceful cast until within a few years of the end, when “death’s pale flag” cast upon it a shade of foreboding.  We have a photograph of him taken when he was about forty-five and in average good health, showing a tranquil face, full of thought and with eyes cast down; to the writer’s mind it is the typical Isaac Hecker.  But this expression changed in conversation, when not only his words but his gestures and his glances challenged a friendly but energetic conflict of opinion.