ability, but it is of
little fruit to themselves personally, and their irremovability is
often of infinite distress to their superiors and brethren. The
episcopate is the one religious order founded by Our Lord, and its
members are in the highest state of evangelical perfection; yet they
are neither required nor advised to take the oaths or vows of
religious orders.

Neither Father Hecker nor any of his associates had the least
aversion to the vows. On the contrary, they had lived contentedly
under them for many of their most active years, and it will be
remembered of Father Hecker that he never found them irksome, had
never known a temptation against them.

The question which arose was a choice between two kinds of community,
the one fast-bound by external obligations to the Church in the form
of vows, placing the members in a relation of peculiar strictness to
the Canon Law; or another kind, in which the members trusted wholly
to the strength of Divine grace, and their own conscious purpose
never to give up the fight for perfection; which of these states
would better facilitate the action of the Holy Spirit in the present
Providence of God; and which of them would tend to produce a type of
character fitted to evangelize a nation of independent and
self-reliant men and women? The free community was chosen.

No doubt this involved some risk of criticism, particularly in the
beginning, for it was a wonder to many that men should organize for a
life-long endeavor after perfection and not swear to it, especially
as none of the free communities existing in Europe had houses in
America, for the Sulpicians belong to the secular clergy. And there
was also danger of unworthy subjects creeping in under favor of a
freedom they were unfit to enjoy. For it may be reproached against us
that we are apt to be victimized by men ruled by caprice, indulging
in extravagant schemes or deluded by wandering fancies; and also by
superiors who would let everybody do as he pleased. No doubt such
dangers are to be guarded against. But vowed communities do not claim
to be free from difficulties. No state of life and no organization
claims to be so perfect as totally to prevent abuse of power on the
part of superiors or caprice and sloth on the part of members.

Both kinds of organized religious life have their difficulties: the
one, the martinet superior and the routine subject; the other, the
capricious subject and the lax superior. In one