by what road Divine Providence was moving men’s minds towards the truth.  His eyes were ever strained to read the signs of God’s providence in men’s lives.  And his conclusion was always the same:  proclaim it on the house-tops that no man can be consistent with his natural aspirations till he has become a Catholic; preach it on the street-corners that the Catholic religion elevates man far above his highest natural force into union with the Deity—­intimate, conscious, and perpetual.

As to systematic preparation for discourses to non-Catholics, Father Hecker had his own peculiar equipment.  As the reader will remember, God had led him in no way more singularly than in his studies, and had led him straight.  The doctrines of the Church were familiar to him, for they had quenched his soul’s thirst.  And he had preached them on the missions, the instructions on the Creed and the Sacraments falling to his share.  He had given these waters of life to other souls, and knew their value.  He was a close student of the dogmatic side of religion.  He had, it is true, little taste for the refinements of theologians, unless they touched the questions of human dignity and the scope of the grace of Christ, which were vital ones to himself.  He viewed religion with wide-sweeping glances, trying to discover every hill of vision or stream of sanctity.  He had plain truths to teach, and he needed none other.  He knew the organism of the Church in clergy and in people, for he had seen it both from without and within.  He had felt the grip of authority fixed in his soul.  He had agonized under the brand of punishment as it burnt into his flesh, and he had seen it changed into the badge of approval.  Within and without he knew Catholicity, loved it daily more and more, and was daily more and more anxious to proclaim it to the world.

It was not from labored preparation of his lectures that success came to Father Hecker.  Even those which seemed the most elaborately prepared he did not write out word for word.  His verbal memory was not trustworthy, and he had to confide in his extemporizing faculty, which was very good, and which became in course of time quite reliable, giving out sentences clear, grammatical, and fit to print.  “I have to produce a sermon for next Sunday,” he once wrote to a friend.  “For me a sermon is always a spontaneous production; I cannot get one up.  The idea must arise and grow up in my own mind.  It is usually hard labor for me to produce it outwardly and give it suitable expression.”  But the effort did not appear in the delivery, for his style, although emphatic, was easy and familiar; his delivery, if not altogether according to the rules of elocution, nevertheless gained his point completely.  No word of his was dead-born.  His voice was not always clear, as he often suffered from bronchial troubles, but it was not unpleasant, and had a penetrating quality, being of that middle pitch which carries to the ends of a large auditorium without provoking the