Life of Father Hecker | Page 8

would not by a word change their faith, if I could.'"
"She had a very earnest temperament, and what she did she did with all her heart. The last years of her life she was a great invalid, but from her sick room she did wonders. Family ties were kept warm, and no one whom she had loved and known was forgotten. The poor were ever welcome, and came to her in crowds, never leaving without help and consolation. She had a very cheerful spirit, and a bright, pleasant, and even witty word for every one.
"But the strongest trait in her character was her deeply religious nature. With the Catholic faith it would have found expression in the religious life, as she sometimes said herself. The faith she had made her most earnest and devout, according to her light."
Mrs. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, who spent a month at the house in Rutgers Street just after Isaac finally returned from Brook Farm, when Mrs. Hecker was in the prime of middle life, speaks of her as "a lovely and dignified character, full of 'humanities.' She was fair, tall, erect, a very superior example of the German house-mother. Hers was the controlling spirit in the house, and her wise and generous influence was felt far beyond it. She was a life-long Methodist, and took me with her to a 'Love Feast,' which I had never witnessed before."
To the good sense, good temper, and strong religious nature of Caroline Hecker her children owed, and always cordially acknowledged, a heavy, and in one respect an almost undivided, debt of gratitude. Neither Engel Freund nor John Hecker professed any religious faith. The latter was never in the habit of attending any place of worship. Both were Lutheran so far as their antecedents could make them so, but neither seems to have practically known much beyond the flat negation, or at best the simple disregard, of Christianity to which Protestantism leads more or less quickly according as the logical faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him. He was a kindly, virtuous, warm-hearted man, with a life of his own which made him incurious and thoughtful, and singularly devoid of prejudices. When his daughter Caroline elected to desert the Reformed Dutch Church in which the family had a pew, and to attach herself to another sect, he had only a jocular word of surprise to say concerning her odd fancy for "those noisy Methodists." He had a true German fondness for old ways and settled customs, and to the end of his days spoke only his own vernacular.
"Why don't you talk English?" somebody once asked him toward the close of his life.
"I don't know how," he answered. "I never had time to learn."
"Why, how long have you been here?"
"About forty years."
"Forty years! And isn't that time enough to learn English in?"
"What can one learn in forty years?" said the old man, with an unanswerable twinkle.
Between him and the youngest of his Hecker grandchildren there existed a singular sympathy and affection. The two were very much together, and the little fellow was allowed to potter about the workshop and encouraged to study the ins and outs of all that went on there, as well as entertained with kindly talk that may at first have been a trifle above his years. But he was a precocious child, shrewd, observant, and thoughtful. It was in the old watchmaker's shop that the boy, not yet a dozen years old, and already hard at work helping to earn his own living, conceived the plan of making a clock with his own hands and presenting it to the church attended by the family, which was situated in Forsyth Street between Walker and Hester. The clock was finished in due time and set up in the church, where it ticked faithfully until the edifice was torn down, some forty years later. Then it was returned to its maker in accordance with a promise made by the pastor when the gift was accepted. In 1872 the opening number of the third volume of The Young Catholic contained a good engraving of it, accompanied by a sketch descriptive of its career. Although Father Hecker did not write the little story, it is so true both to fact and to sentiment that we make an extract from it. The clock hung in the Paulist sacristy for about ten years. Then, for some reason, it was taken