“Christmas, 1885.—­For the first time since early summer Father Hecker undertook to say Mass:  I assisted him, and a stormy time we had of it.  It was at five in the morning and in the oratory.  He wanted to have the door locked, but there was no key.  ’Don’t speak a word to me,’ he said while he was dressing in his room.  Arrived in the oratory, he sank down upon a bench as if some one had struck him; he threw his birettum down on the floor, and began to weep and cry in a very mournful way and aloud.  But he quickly recovered, and rested as if he were preparing to be hanged.  I supported him over to the altar, and as he began the Judica he blubbered out the words like a school-boy being whipped.  Most of the Mass he said out loud, hardly holding in his sobs anywhere except from the hanc igitur till near the Pater Noster. His calmest time was during that most solemn part, and at his Communion.  Three or four times he was forced to sit down on a chair I had provided for him on the predella.  At the Memento for the living he was deeply affected and patted the floor with his foot, sobbing aloud and acting like a child with an unendurable toothache.  He was afraid of the Pater Noster and asked me to say it with him, which I did; also various words and sentences in other parts of the Mass.  I have heard him say that the Pater Noster is a prayer which breaks him down.  After he was through he insisted on trying to say the Pope’s prayers.  We said the Hail Marys and the Hail, Holy Queen, together, and I recited the prayer for him.  I had to take off his vestments the best I could while he sat, and when I got him down to his room and into bed, he was in a state of nearly complete unconsciousness.  After saying my three Masses, I saw him again at about 8.30, found him up and dressed and very bright, and he has been particularly so all day.”

What follows is from a letter dated early in 1886, and seems to refer to the occasion above described.  He speaks of himself in the third person: 

“And he [Father Hecker] was never so occupied as now, although he is doing nothing and has been in that condition for months.  Though he does hear Mass, he does not, because he cannot, say it—­without showing what a big fool he is.  However he has begun again to say it.  If it had not been for human respect he would not have said it last Sunday; he was too feeble.  God is killing him by slow fire, by inches.  He dies terribly hard.”

If Father Hecker had had an unimpaired physical system when his interior trials came, he might have resisted the nervous depression which they caused, at least well enough to maintain an active part in his undertakings.  Or if his bodily weakness, resulting from his early austerities, had been accompanied with interior equanimity, he might have held up.  A rickety ship can, with care and skill, get into port if the engine is sound, and so can a sound ship with a broken-down engine