It may be said of him without exaggeration that he was every moment ready, if it became necessary, to bear witness to the divinity of the Church by martyrdom, and in fact he often made that declaration.  In him the most heroic virtue was faith.  He had come into the Catholic Church in spite of the most extreme natural repugnance, and he remained in it, overcoming the perpetual objection of Protestants that Catholicity could not be the truth because Catholic countries had become the least powerful and the least prosperous in the civilized world.  On this point he loved to expound the text of Scripture which says that it is better to lose an eye and an arm and enter into the kingdom of heaven, than to save both, and fall into hell.  His piety was wholly interior.  It consisted in the perpetual exercise of the presence of God.  He had a natural disinclination for devotional practices as they are in vogue among the southern races.

His tendency was to spiritualize as much as possible all the devotions in use in the Church.  His own principal one was to the Holy Ghost and His divine Gifts.  He never spoke of the Incarnation and the Eucharist without deep emotion and a contagious love.  As to devotion to the Blessed Virgin, he explained it in a most elevated manner, ever showing, and with great dignity and nobility of manner, how it flowed from the principle of the divine maternity.  The last book he sent me was one on the Blessed Virgin written by an American priest.  Since Father Hecker’s death I have never failed a single day to invoke him in my prayers, and to his intercession I attribute many graces obtained, some of them very important.

III

Father Hecker had a marvellous openness of heart.  I heard him relate several times the story of his life, his conversion, his joining the Redemptorists, his case before the Roman Congregations, and the founding of the Paulist community.  I can still recall the banks of the Lake of Geneva at the Villa Bartoloni, where Father Hecker, walking with a friend and myself, told us of his leaving the Redemptorist order.  It was the way in which he talked of so delicate a matter that enabled me to appreciate that the man was a saint.  He liked to repeat, while on this subject, what Cardinal Deschamps had said of him:  “Here is a man who has been able to leave our Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer without committing even a venial sin.”

In my opinion, Father Hecker was, after Pere Lacordaire, the most remarkable sacred orator of the century.  This does not apply to his writings, for his ideas lost much of their force in the process of getting into print.  Like all natural orators his chief quality was a power of drawing and persuading, which, to use an expression often applied to Pere Lacordaire, had something magnetic about it.  He had a prodigious gift of showing his Protestant or infidel hearers that their own hearts and their own reason aspired by instinct