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As he loved his vows as a Redemptorist, so he loved the work of the missions, because they were God's will for him; because they are a work of the highest order of good for souls; because the reputation of Catholicity is always raised in a community by a mission, and a good name is necessary for a controversial standing; because in them he daily learned more of men and of the means to win them; and because the members of the divine order of the episcopate and secular priesthood must be well known by him and he well known to them before any extensive work could be done among non-Catholics; and the missionary becomes a familiar friend everywhere he goes.
All this contributes to prepare non-Catholics to hear from the same teachers the invitation which our Lord intended in saying: "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also must I bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd." Furthermore, it was necessary that Father Hecker should be made personally known to the bishops and priests of the country.
The reason is because the author takes nothing for granted, propounds difficulties common to all non-Catholics, sceptics as well as professing Protestants, and offers solutions verifiable by inspection of every-day Catholicity and by evidences right at hand.
In France, Spain, Portugal, and a large part of Italy, all through the seventeenth century, the youth were trained in the maxim the Prince is the State, and his pleasure is law. Bossuet, in his politics, did only faithfully express the political sentiments and convictions of his age, shared by the great body of Catholics as well as of non-Catholics.
Nor did the attitude of non-Catholics, taking them generally, invite anything else. Isaac Hecker, passing into the Church, not only came into contact with its members, but was to be for some years exclusively in their company.
Outside of a few casual cases of conversion prompted often by marriage, and of some spasmodic efforts during a mission, are we not bound to admit that our policy in our relation with non-Catholics has been one of aloofness and waiting. This attitude of aloofness may be traced to many causes.
That this is the vocation of the Church of his day was Isaac Hecker's passionate conviction. He was able to communicate this to Catholics of the old stock as well as to influence non-Catholics in favor of the Church; perhaps even more so.
The charm of Rome is gone, even to non-Catholics, for they felt raised above themselves into a more congenial and spiritual atmosphere while here, and their souls enjoyed it, though their intellectual prejudices were opposed to the principles. The charm they were conscious of forced them back again to Rome in spite of themselves. But that charm has in a great measure gone.
The Parliament, still agitated and anxious, had at last enregistered the edict relating to non-Catholics. Public opinion, like the government, supported it eagerly; the principles of tolerance which had prompted it were henceforth accepted by all; certain bishops and certain bigots were still trying to hinder this first step towards a legal status for a long while refused to Protestants.
The decay of the Protestant bond of cohesion from lapse of time and from the unsettlement of belief in its chief doctrines; the fighting of two wars, one of them the great Rebellion, which fused the populations of States and acquainted men better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop Hughes himself and of his contemporaries these and other causes have made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a different spirit from what wisdom dictated fifty years ago.
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