. The tendencies which shape men's efforts to secure
happiness in this world, in so far as they are innocent, indicated to
him what choice of means should be made to propagate the knowledge
and love of God. According to this, the most successful worker for a
people's sanctification will be kindred to them by conviction and by
sympathy in all that concerns their political and social life. Men's
aspirations in the natural order point out the highway of God's
representatives. As these aspirations change from era to era, so do
the main lines of religious effort change, the highways of one age
becoming the byways of another. It is true that no method for the
elevation of human nature to divine union, which the Church has
sanctioned, ever becomes quite obsolete, but the merest glance at the
differences between the spiritual characteristics of the martyrs, the
hermits, the monks, the friars, shows that one form of the Christian
virtues succeeds another in general possession of men's souls. The
new spirit, without crowding the old one off its beaten track,
follows men to the new ways whither the providence of God in the
natural order has led them. "First the natural man," says St. Paul,
"and then the spiritual." Different types of spirituality are brought
forward by Almighty God to sanctify men in new conditions of life.
Among the foremost of these are religious communities of men and
women. Hence their duty to adjust themselves, as far as faith and
discipline permit, to the circumstances of the times. The power of a
religious community for good will be measured by its ability to
elevate the natural to the supernatural without shocking it or
thwarting it.

Now, every one knows that this age differs materially from past ones.
It differs by a wider spread of education and an uncontrollable
longing after liberty, civil, political, and personal.

Father Hecker was penetrated with the belief that the intelligence
and liberty, whose well-ordered enjoyment he had witnessed in
America, and which he loved so deeply himself, were divine
invitations to the apostolate of the Holy Spirit. He was profoundly
impressed with the certainty of the development, the extension, and
the permanence of these political and social changes; and he knew
that they demanded of men a personal independence of character far in
advance of previous generations. And he knew, also, that for the
sanctification of such men the aids of religion, though not changed