Life of Father Hecker | Page 5

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 favorite design to which he gave no small measure of time and labor. He anticipated by many years the battlings of our temperance apostles. The Paulist pulpit opened death-dealing batteries upon the saloon when the saloon-keeper was the hero in state and church. The Catholic University of America found in him one of its warmest advocates. His zeal was as broad as St. Paul's, and whoever did good was his friend and received his support. The walls of his parish, or his order, did not circumscribe for him God's Church. His choice of a patron saint--St. Paul--reveals the fire burning within his soul. He would not, he could not be idle. On his sick-bed, where he lay the greater part of his latter years, he was not inactive. He wrote valuable articles and books, and when unable to write, he dictated.
He was enthusiastic in his work, as all are who put their whole soul into what they are doing. Such people have no time to count the dark linings of the silvery clouds; they realize that God and man together do not fail. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm. It fits a man to be a leader; it secures a following. A bishop who was present at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore has told me that when Father Hecker appeared before the assembled prelates and theologians in advocacy of Catholic literature as a missionary force, the picture was inspiring, and that the hearers, receiving a Pentecostal fire within their bosoms, felt as if America were to be at once converted. So would it have been if there had been in America a sufficient number of Heckers. He had his critics. Who ever tries to do something outside routine lines against whom hands are not raised and whose motives and acts are not misconstrued? A venerable clergyman one day thought he had scored a great point against Father Hecker by jocosely suggesting to him as the motto of his new order the word "Paulatim." The same one, no doubt, would have made a like suggestion to the Apostle of the Gentiles. Advocates of "Paulatim" methods have too often left the wheels of Christ's chariot fast in the mire. We rejoice, for its sake, that enthusiasts sometimes appear on the scene. The missions of the early Paulists, into which went Father Hecker's entire heart, aroused the country. To-day, after a lapse of thirty or thirty-five years, they are remembered as events wherever they were preached.
His was the profound conviction that, in the present age at any rate, the order of the day should be individual action--every man doing his full duty, and waiting for no one else to prompt him. This, I take it, was largely the meaning of Father Hecker's oft-repeated teaching on the work of the Holy Ghost in souls. There have been epochs in history where the Church, sacrificing her outposts and the ranks of her skirmishers to the preservation of her central and vital fortresses, put the brakes, through necessity, from the nature of the warfare waged against her, upon individual activity, and moved her soldiers in serried masses; and then it was the part and the glory of each one to move with the column. The need of repression has passed away. The authority of the Church and of her Supreme Head is beyond danger of being denied or obscured, and each Christian soldier may take to the field, obeying the breathings of the Spirit of truth and piety within him, feeling that what he may do he should do. There is work for individual priests, and for individual laymen, and so soon as it is discovered let it be done. The responsibility is upon each one; the indifference of others is no excuse. Said Father Hecker one day to a friend: "There is too much waiting upon the action of others. The layman waits for the priest, the priest for the bishop, and the bishop for the pope,