in
was, to him, the self-luminous guarantee of his mission to instruct.
But until that certainty was attained, in a manner satisfactory to
both the intellectual and the ethical sides of his nature, he was
silent.

As a priest, though he undertook to teach anybody and everybody, yet
he could seldom have given the impression of desiring to impose his
personal views, simply as such. His vital perception that there can
be nothing private in truth shone through his speech too plainly for
so gross a misconception to be easily made by candid minds. The fact
is that the community of spiritual goods was vividly realized by him,
and in good faith he credited all men with a longing like his own to
see things as they really are. As he had by nature a very kindly
manner, benignant and cheerful, the average man readily submitted to
his influence. In his prime he was always a most successful and
popular preacher and lecturer, from the combined effect of this
earnestness of conviction and his personal magnetic quality. Men
whose mental characteristics resembled his became, soon or late, his
enthusiastic disciples, and as to others, although at first some were
inclined to suspect him, many of them ended by becoming his warm
friends.

It is in this light that we must view the precocious efforts of the
young politician. Nothing was further from his thoughts at any time
than to employ politics as a means to any private end. Although we
have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand
some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and
enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made
solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of
self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature--a Stoic,
not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader
will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of
Father Hecker's interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even
here without explaining that we use the word ascetic in its proper
sense, to connote the rightful dominance of reason over appetite, the
supremacy of the higher over the lower; not the jurisdiction of the
judge over the criminal. In his case, during the greater part of his
life, the adjustment of the higher and lower, the restraint he placed
upon the beast in view of the elevation due to the man, was neither
conceived nor felt as punitive. We shall see later on how God finall