nto 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 towards the
Catholic truth which he was teaching them. In that way he drew his
hearers to discover the truth in their own minds instead of receiving
it by force of argument or any extrinsic authority. To acquire this
power he had made a great study of the Gospel, and, sustained by
Divine grace, he went about the exposition of the truth as Jesus
Christ did. One of the most original aspects of his mind was that he
joined the practical sense of the American to the taste and aptitude
of the European for speculation. He had not been able to make a
complete course of studies because he had spent several years in
commercial life, but he had great natural gifts for metaphysics,
theology, and above all mysticism.

Unlike the English converts of the Oxford school, he had reached
Catholicity by way of liberal Protestantism, which he had renounced
because it could not satisfy the religious aspirations of his nature.
It would be interesting to study his case in connection with those of
Newman and Manning, for it shows that souls are led to Catholicity by
all roads, even the most opposite, and that minds most inclined to
rationalize can be drawn to the Church as easily as those of a
conservative or traditional temperament.

IV

But I wish to dwell especially on what preoccupied Father Hecker's
mind and formed the fundamental theme of his eloquent words. We were
just on the morrow of the Vatican Council, of the defeat of France by
Prussia, and in the first agonies of the Culturkampf in Germany and
Italy. Now, if one remembers that Father Hecker was of an American
family originally from the town of Elberfeld, Prussia, he can better
understand the gravity of the problem which weighed upon his mind, as
upon that of so many others. Must we admit, it was asked, that the
Council of the Vatican has affixed its seal upon the decadence of
Catholicity, binding the Church to the failing fortunes of the Latin
races? Must Protestantism finally triumph with the Saxon races? And
here Father Hecker's faith did not halt an instant, but grasped the
difficulty in all its terrible magnitude. His solution may be
questioned by some, but