All his life Father Hecker was on the lookout for the great human influences which run across those of religion, either to swell their volume or to lessen their force.  These are mainly the transmissions of heredity, and the environments that are racial, temporal, epochal, or local.  This enduring tendency is foreshadowed in the following extracts: 

“August 2, 1843.—­I have been thinking much of late about the very great influence which nationality and the family progenitors have upon character.  Men talk of universality, impartiality, many-sidedness, free judgment, unbiased opinion, and so on, when in reality their national and family dispositions are the centre and ground of their being, and hence of their opinions.  They appear to be most themselves when they show these traits of character.  They are most natural and earnest and at home when they speak from this link which binds them to the past.  Then their hearts are opened, and they speak with a glow of eloquence and a peculiar unction which touch the same chord in the breasts of those who hear them.  It is well for man to feel his indebtedness to the past which lives in him and without which he would not be what he is.  He is far more its creature than he gives himself credit for.  He reproduces daily the sentiments and thoughts of the dim and obscure before.  There are certain ideas and aspirations which have not had their fulfilment, but which run through all men from the beginning and which are continually reproduced.  There is a unity of race, called Humanity; one of place, called Nationality; one of birth, called Kindred; one of affinity, called Love and Friendship.  By all these we are greatly influenced.  They all make their mark upon the man.”

“The faculties which take cognizance of the inner world have been awakened in only a few of the human race, and these, to distinguish them, have been called prophets, miracle-workers, Providential men, seers, and poets.  Now, their privilege is that of all men in a greater or less degree, just as is the case with regard to the faculties which relate to the outward world.  For when men in general were as ignorant about the exterior world as they now are about the interior, the men of science, the astronomers, the mathematicians, the founders of the arts, were held to be miraculous, gods, and they were deified.  What any one man (and this is a most comfortable and cheering thought) has been or has done, all men may in a measure be or do, for each is a type, a specimen of the whole human race.  If it is said in reply, ’These miracles or great acts, which you hold as actual, are mere superstitious dreams,’ I care not.  That would be still more glorious for us, for then they are still to be performed, they are in the coming time, these divine prophetic instincts are yet to be actualized.  The dreams of Orpheus, the inspired strains of the Hebrew bards, and, above all, the prophecies of Christ, are before us.  The divine instincts will be realized as surely as