If it be asked, how did Father Hecker recreate himself during those mournful years, the answer is that recreation in the sense of a pleasurable relaxation seemed contrary to his nature whether in sickness or in health.  It was once said to him, “Easter week is always a lazy time.”  “No, it is not,” he answered.  “I never have known a time, not a moment, in my whole life, when I felt lazy or was in an idle mood.”  He found himself obliged, however, to get out of the house and take exercise, walking in the park leaning on the arm of one of the community, or, if he was more than usually weak, being driven in his brother’s carriage.  There were occasions when to kill time was for him to kill care—­to call his mind away from thoughts of death and of the judgment, the dread of which fell upon him like eternal doom.  Then he would try to get some one to talk to, or to go with him and look at pictures and statues; or he would work at mending old clocks, a pretty well mended collection of which he kept in his room against such occasions.  In the park he would often go and look at the beasts in the menagerie, and he spoke of them affectionately.  “They bring to my mind the power and beauty of God,” he said.  He came to meals with the community, at least to dinner, until five or six years before his death, when his appetite became so unreliable that he took what food he could, and when he could, in his room.  He also attended the community recreations after meals until a few years before the end; but it was often noticed that the process of humiliation he was undergoing caused him to creep away into a corner, sit awhile with a very dejected look, and then wearily go upstairs to his room.  When he was urged not to do this, “I cannot help it to save my life,” was all the answer he could give.  He finally gave up the recreations almost entirely.

But he hated laziness.  “I am so weak,” he once said, “and my brain is so easily tired out that I am forced to read a great deal to recreate myself.  That’s why you see me reading so much.”  The book in which he was at the moment seeking recreation was a ponderous work on metaphysics by a prolix Scotchman, treating in many dreary chapters of such amusing topics as the unity of the act of perception with the object perceived!  As may be supposed of such a man, whose illness forbade action and whose interior trials made contemplation an agony, he chafed sometimes at his enforced inactivity, though he was never heard, as far as we can get evidence, openly to complain of it.

Time and stagnation of bodily forces did not alter his progressive ideas.

“Is it not wiser,” he said, “to give one’s thought and energy to prepare the way for the future success and triumph of religion than to labor to continue the present [state of things], which must be and is being supplanted?  Such an attitude may not be understood and may be misinterpreted, and be one of trial and suffering; still it is the only one which, consistently with a sense of duty, can be taken and maintained.”