I cannot but allude, whether I understand or not the true intent of it, to what appears to have been a leading fact in his life:  his leaving an old-established religious community for the purpose of instituting that of the Paulists.  I will speak so far of this as I have formed an estimate of it.  To me, this fact seems to have been a Providential circumstance in keeping with all else in his life.  I myself have at this moment such thoughts as I imagine must have been running through his mind during that memorable sojourn in Rome, which resulted in freeing him from his old allegiance.  The work of evangelizing America demands new methods.  It is time to draw forth from our treasury the “new things” of the Gospel; we have been long enough offering “old things.”  Those new methods call for newly-equipped men.  The parochial clergy will readily confess that they cannot of themselves do all that God now demands from His Church in this country.  They are too heavily burdened with the ordinary duties of the ministry:  instructing those already within the fold, administering the sacraments, building temples, schools, and asylums—­duties which must be attended to and which leave slight leisure for special studies or special labors.  Father Hecker organized the Paulist community, and did in his way a great work for the conversion of the country.  He made no mistake when he planned for a body of priests, more disciplined than usually are the parochial clergy, and more supple in the character of their institute than the existing religious orders.

We shall always distinguish Isaac Thomas Hecker as the ornament, the flower of our American priesthood—­the type that we wish to see reproduced among us in widest proportions.  Ameliorations may be sought for in details, and the more of them the better for religion; but the great lines of Father Hecker’s personality we should guard with jealous love in the formation of the future priestly characters of America.

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The life of father Hecker
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CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

Towards the close of the eighteenth century a German clockmaker named Engel Freund, accompanied by his wife and children, left his native town of Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia, to seek a new home in America.  There is a family tradition to the effect that his forefathers were French, and that they came into Germany on account of some internal commotion in their own country.  The name makes it more probable that they were Alsatians who quietly moved across the Rhine, either when their province was first ceded to France, or perhaps later, at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685.  When Engel Freund quitted Germany the disturbing influences of the French Revolution may have had a considerable share in determining his departure.  He landed at New York in 1797 and established himself in Hester Street, between Christie and Forsyth.