y can evangelize the rough charioteer by means of the written word
as easily as they can his cultured master.

To Father Hecker the Press was the highest opportunity for religion.
The only term of comparison for it is some element of nature like
sunlight or the atmosphere. In the Press civilized Man lives and
breathes. Father Hecker was as alive to the injury done to humanity
by bad reading as a skilful physician is to the malaria which he can
smell and fairly taste in an infected atmosphere; and he ever strove
to make the Press a means of enlightenment and virtue. He began to
write for publication almost immediately after his arrival in America
as a Redemptorist missionary; the _Questions of the Soul_ and the
_Aspirations of Nature_ were composed amidst most absorbing
occupations between 1853 and 1858. Throughout life he was ever asking
himself and others how the Press could be cleansed, and how its
Apostolate could be inaugurated. To this end he was ready to devote
all his efforts, and expend all his resources and those of the
community of which he was the founder. It is true that no man of his
time was better aware of the power of the spoken word, and few were
more competent to use it, the natural and Pentecostal vehicle of the
Holy Spirit to men's souls. But he also felt that the providence of
God, in making the Press of our day an artificial medium of human
intercourse more universal than the living voice itself, had pointed
it out as a necessary adjunct to the oral preaching of the truth. He
was convinced that religion should make the Press its own. He would
not look upon it as an extraordinary aid, but maintained that the
ordinary provision of Christian instruction for the people should
ever be two-fold, by speech and by print: neither the Preacher
without the Press nor the Press without the Preacher. He was heard to
say that in reading Montalembert's _Monks of the West_ he had been
struck with the author's eloquent apostrophe to the spade, the
instrument of civilization and Christianity for the wild hordes of
the early middle ages. Much rather, he said, should we worship the
Press as the medium of the light of God to all mankind. He felt that
the Apostolate of the Press might well absorb the external vocation
of the most active friends of religion.

In the Press he found a distinct suggestion from above of a change of
methods for elevating men to truth and virtue. In the spring of 1870,
while on his way home f