Life of Father Hecker | Page 4

to Catholic
teaching. Christ came not to destroy, but to perfect what was in man,
and the graces and truths of revelation lead most securely to the
elevation of the life that is, no less than to the gaining of the life to
come. It is a fact, however, that in other times and other countries the
Church has been impeded in her social work, and certain things or
customs of those times and countries, transplanted upon American soil
and allowed to grow here under a Catholic name, will do her no honor
among Americans. The human mind, among the best of us, inclines to
narrow limitations, and certain Catholics, aware of the comparatively
greater importance of the supernatural, partially overlook the natural.
Then, too, casuists have incidentally done us harm. They will quote as
our rule of social conduct in America what may have been tolerated in
France or Germany during the seventeenth century, and their
hair-splitting distinctions in the realm of abstract right and wrong are
taken by some of us as practical decisions, without due reference to
local circumstances. The American people pay slight attention to the
abstract; they look only to the concrete in morals, and we must keep
account of their manner of judging things. The Church is nowadays
called upon to emphasize her power in the natural order. God forbid
that I entertain, as some may be tempted to suspect me of doing, the
slightest notion that vigilance may be turned off one single moment
from the guard of the supernatural. For the sake of the supernatural I
speak. And natural virtues, practised in the proper frame of mind and
heart, become supernatural. Each century calls for its type of Christian
perfection. At one time it was martyrdom; at another it was the
humility of the cloister. To-day we need the Christian gentleman and
the Christian citizen. An honest ballot and social decorum among
Catholics will do more for God's glory and the salvation of souls than
midnight flagellations or Compostellan pilgrimages.
On a line with his principles, as I have so far delineated them, Father
Hecker believed that if he would succeed in his work for souls, he
should use in it all the natural energy that God had given him, and he
acted up to his belief I once heard a good old priest, who said his beads

well and made a desert around his pulpit by miserable preaching,
criticise Father Hecker, who, he imagined, put too much reliance in
man, and not enough in God. Father Hecker's piety, his assiduity in
prayer, his personal habits of self-denial, repel the aspersion that he
failed in reliance upon God. But my old priest--and he has in the church
to-day, both in America and Europe, tens of thousands of
counterparts--was more than half willing to see in all outputtings of
human energy a lack of confidence in God. We sometimes rely far
more upon God than God desires us to do, and there are occasions
when a novena is the refuge of laziness or cowardice. God has endowed
us with natural talents, and not one of them shall be, with His
permission, enshrouded in a napkin. He will not work a miracle, or
supply grace, to make up for our deficiencies. We must work as if all
depended on us, and pray as if all depended on God.
God never proposed to do by His direct action all that might be done in
and through the Church. He invites human co-operation, and abandons
to it a wide field. The ages of most active human industry in religious
enterprises were the ages of most remarkable spiritual conquests. The
tendency to overlook this fact shows itself among us. Newman writes
that where the sun shines bright in the warm climate of the south, the
natives of the place know little of safeguards against cold and wet.
They have their cold days, but only now and then, and they do not
deem it worth their while to provide against them: the science of
calefaction is reserved for the north. And so, Protestants, depending on
human means solely, are led to make the most of them; their sole
resource is to use what they have; they are the anxious cultivators of a
rugged soil. Catholics, on the contrary, feel that God will protect the
Church, and, as Newman adds, "we sometimes forget that we shall
please Him best, and get most from Him, when, according to the fable,
we put our shoulder to the wheel, when we use what we have by nature
to the utmost, at the same time that we look out for what is beyond
nature in the confidence of faith and hope." Lately a witty French
writer pictures to us the pious friends of the