towards the Catholic truth which he was teaching them.  In that way he drew his hearers to discover the truth in their own minds instead of receiving it by force of argument or any extrinsic authority.  To acquire this power he had made a great study of the Gospel, and, sustained by Divine grace, he went about the exposition of the truth as Jesus Christ did.  One of the most original aspects of his mind was that he joined the practical sense of the American to the taste and aptitude of the European for speculation.  He had not been able to make a complete course of studies because he had spent several years in commercial life, but he had great natural gifts for metaphysics, theology, and above all mysticism.

Unlike the English converts of the Oxford school, he had reached Catholicity by way of liberal Protestantism, which he had renounced because it could not satisfy the religious aspirations of his nature.  It would be interesting to study his case in connection with those of Newman and Manning, for it shows that souls are led to Catholicity by all roads, even the most opposite, and that minds most inclined to rationalize can be drawn to the Church as easily as those of a conservative or traditional temperament.

IV

But I wish to dwell especially on what preoccupied Father Hecker’s mind and formed the fundamental theme of his eloquent words.  We were just on the morrow of the Vatican Council, of the defeat of France by Prussia, and in the first agonies of the Culturkampf in Germany and Italy.  Now, if one remembers that Father Hecker was of an American family originally from the town of Elberfeld, Prussia, he can better understand the gravity of the problem which weighed upon his mind, as upon that of so many others.  Must we admit, it was asked, that the Council of the Vatican has affixed its seal upon the decadence of Catholicity, binding the Church to the failing fortunes of the Latin races?  Must Protestantism finally triumph with the Saxon races?  And here Father Hecker’s faith did not halt an instant, but grasped the difficulty in all its terrible magnitude.  His solution may be questioned by some, but I believe that no one will dispute that the mind which conceived it was of the first order.

Father Hecker remarked, as did many others, that, starting from the sixteenth century, the Church, although ever exerting a considerable influence, no longer appeared at the head of the world’s activity.  This was in contrast with what she had done in the era of the conversion of the Roman Empire, during that of the invasion of the barbarians, and amid the immense religious movement which characterized the apogee of the Middle Ages.  Father Hecker discovered the cause of this lessening influence in the fact that since the sixteenth century the Church had been compelled to stand upon the defensive.  This had greatly paralyzed her power of initiation and her liberty.