The Latin races were fitted by nature to be the principal instruments of the Holy Spirit during the period just passed.  In the new one the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races, of a nature strongly individual and independent, will take their turn as instruments of Divine Providence.  This is not saying that the development of the Church is the result of the natural aptitudes of races, but that God, who has created these aptitudes, takes them one after the other, and at the hours He chooses, and causes them to serve as instruments for carrying out His designs.  It was thus, from the fourth to the seventh century, that He made use of the metaphysical subtilty implanted by Him in the Greek genius, issuing in all those great definitions which have fixed not only the substance but the verbal form of Catholic dogma.  Hence the first general councils were all held in the East.

Father Hecker cherished hopes for the conversion of the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon races.  Doubtless God could convert them suddenly, but considering the way heretofore followed that conversion will be brought about insensibly and by the two following instrumentalities:  On the one hand, the new development of individuality in souls within the Church will create a sympathetic attraction towards her on the part of Protestants, who will discover affinities with her of which they were wholly unaware.  On the other hand, the more the Protestant races expand, the more they will find the dwarfed Christianity which they profess falling short of their aspirations, and by that means they will be inclined towards Catholicity.  It is not a little remarkable that Father Hecker expressed himself thus during the last years of the pontificate of Pius IX., at a moment when such ideas seemed to be least in favor in high Catholic circles.  But soon afterwards the pontificate of Leo XIII. began, and with it a movement in the spirit indicated by the American priest, and in a manner so strikingly in accord with his views that Father Hecker seemed to have been enlightened from above in his presages of the future.

Father Hecker developed a grand theological synthesis of what he called the exterior and interior mission of the Holy Spirit in the Church.  He has explained it in a pamphlet; but how much more impressive it was when he expounded it in person!  We had the privilege of hearing him do so in a long conversation with the most celebrated Protestant minister of French-speaking countries, the illustrious philosopher and orator, Ernest Naville.  Father Hecker said that the antipathy of Protestants for the Church arose from the fact that they imagined that Catholicity reduced all religion to obedience to external authority.  Protestants, on the other hand, pretend to place all religion in the interior life, directly generated in souls by the Holy Spirit, and it is for this reason that Catholicity impresses them as a tyrannical usurpation and a stupid formalism.  In this they are deceived, as a close