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What has been said in this chapter, besides serving to exhibit Father Hecker's principles as a founder, will be, we trust, a sufficient answer to the silly delusion which the Paulists have encountered in some quarters, that their society tolerates a soft life and supposes in its members no high vocation to perfection; or that the voluntary principle allows them a personal choice in regard to the devotional exercises, permitting them to attend or not attend this or that meditation or devotion laid down in the rule, as "the spirit moves them."
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.
The following extract from The Church and the Age, a compilation of Father Hecker's later essays, shows his estimate of the form of spirituality we have been discussing, as bearing upon the regeneration of society in general: "The whole aim of the science of Christian perfection is to instruct men how to remove the hindrances in the way of the action of the Holy Spirit, and how to cultivate those virtues which are most favorable to His solicitations and inspirations.
That the use of the Scriptures is not, and cannot be made the ordinary means for making all men Christians, was plain to Isaac Hecker for other reasons than the essential one thus clearly stated. Such is Father Hecker's argument in a powerful article in The Catholic World for October, 1883.
On his return to New York he was too weak to bear the routine of the house in Fifty-ninth Street and lived with his brother George till the fall of 1879, when he removed to the convent, remaining with the community till his death nine years afterwards. As to the physical sufferings of those last sixteen years, they were never such as to impair Father Hecker's mental soundness.
Father Heilig had been Brother Hecker's confessor for two years at Wittem, and had at least tacitly approved his spirit; and now came his condemnation. No wonder that Isaac was profoundly distressed by it. Yet his conviction of the validity of his inner life was not shaken for an instant. Nor was the trial of long duration.
The Literarischer Handweiser, a German Catholic critical review, published in Münster, having a high character and wide circulation, gave an equally favorable estimate of Father Hecker's views in a notice of The Church and the Age.
We rejoice, for its sake, that enthusiasts sometimes appear on the scene. The missions of the early Paulists, into which went Father Hecker's entire heart, aroused the country. To-day, after a lapse of thirty or thirty-five years, they are remembered as events wherever they were preached.
The following extracts from the memoranda may be of interest as embodying Father Hecker's views of how to study divinity, resulting from his own experience in preparing for the priesthood: "March, 1884. I told Father Hecker, in course of conversation, about my reading the life of the Curé of Ars.
I admire your asceticism; it is nothing new to me; I have practised it a long time myself. If you can get the Everlasting out of my mind, I'm yours. "What did Alcott say when you left?" "He went to Lane and said, 'Well, Hecker has flunked out. He hadn't the courage to persevere. He's a coward. But Lane said, 'No; you're mistaken. Hecker's right. He wanted more than we had to give him." Mr.
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