al talents, and not one of them shall
be, with His permission, enshrouded in a napkin. He will not work a
miracle, or supply grace, to make up for our deficiencies. We must
work as if all depended on us, and pray as if all depended on God.

God never proposed to do by His direct action all that might be done
in and through the Church. He invites human co-operation, and
abandons to it a wide field. The ages of most active human industry
in religious enterprises were the ages of most remarkable spiritual
conquests. The tendency to overlook this fact shows itself among us.
Newman writes that where the sun shines bright in the warm climate of
the south, the natives of the place know little of safeguards against
cold and wet. They have their cold days, but only now and then, and
they do not deem it worth their while to provide against them: the
science of calefaction is reserved for the north. And so,
Protestants, depending on human means solely, are led to make the
most of them; their sole resource is to use what they have; they are
the anxious cultivators of a rugged soil. Catholics, on the contrary,
feel that God will protect the Church, and, as Newman adds, "we
sometimes forget that we shall please Him best, and get most from
Him, when, according to the fable, we put our shoulder to the wheel,
when we use what we have by nature to the utmost, at the same time
that we look out for what is beyond nature in the confidence of faith
and hope." Lately a witty French writer pictures to us the pious
friends of the leading Catholic layman of France, De Mun, kneeling in
spiritual retreat when their presence is required in front of the
enemy. The Catholic of the nineteenth century all over the world is
too quiet, too easily resigned to "the will of God," attributing to
God the effects of his own timidity and indolence. Father Hecker
rolled up his sleeves and "pitched in" with desperate resolve. He
fought as for very life. Meet him anywhere or at any time, he was at
work or he was planning to work. He was ever looking around to see
what might be done. He did with a rush the hard labor of a missionary
and of a pastor, and he went beyond it into untrodden pathways. He
hated routine. He minded not what others had been doing, seeking only
what he himself might do. His efforts for the diffusion of Catholic
literature, THE CATHOLIC WORLD, his several books, the Catholic
tracts, tell his zeal and energy. A Catholic daily paper was a
favor