With reference to the interior life, I can affirm that Father Hecker’s was full and rich.  Having spent the greater part of his life in a devouring activity, at its close he lived as a true contemplative.  He was a genuine mystic.  We heard him discourse with marvellous beauty on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, expounding these great truths in a way not only to enrapture one with their splendor, but utterly to refute deism, pantheism, and materialism.  The latter error, he said, owed its introduction partly to the fact that Protestantism had refused to the senses their legitimate place in divine worship, this excessive spiritualizing having brought about a reaction.

V

Father Hecker often spoke of the future reserved for Catholicity in the United States, saying that it was there that the union of the Church with democracy would first take place.  In that nation the prejudice against the Church is not so strong as in Europe, and her position is free from the embarrassments of traditional difficulties.  Catholicity is there valued for its immediate effect upon human nature, and the rancor born of historical recollections is not in such full control of men’s minds; hence conversions are more easily made.  Furthermore, Father Hecker believed that it would finally be discovered that the Protestant spirit is contrary to the political spirit of the American Republic.  America has based her Constitution on the fact that man is born free, reasonable, and capable of self-government.  The Protestant Reformers, on the contrary, never ceased to teach that original sin deprived man of his free will and made him incapable of performing virtuous acts; and if Protestants seek to escape from this whirlpool of fatalism, they fall into infidelity.  The day will come when Americans will admit that if they are to be at once religious and reasonable, they must become Catholics.  Therefore, whether it be acknowledged or not, every development of political liberty in the United States contributes to the advance of Catholicity.  The Constitution of the United States has formulated the political principles most conformable to the Canons of the Council of Trent.