Life of Father Hecker | Page 6

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, while the Holy Ghost sends
down to all the reproof that He is prompting each one, and no one
moves for Him." Father Hecker was original in his ideas, as well as in
his methods; there was no routine in him, mental or practical.
I cannot but allude, whether I understand or not the true intent of it, to
what appears to have been a leading fact in his life: his leaving an
old-established religious community for the purpose of instituting that

of the Paulists. I will speak so far of this as I have formed an estimate
of it. To me, this fact seems to have been a Providential circumstance
in keeping with all else in his life. I myself have at this moment such
thoughts as I imagine must have been running through his mind during
that memorable sojourn in Rome, which resulted in freeing him from
his old allegiance. The work of evangelizing America demands new
methods. It is time to draw forth from our treasury the "new things" of
the Gospel; we have been long enough offering "old things." Those
new methods call for newly-equipped men. The parochial clergy will
readily confess that they cannot of themselves do all that God now
demands from His Church in this country. They are too heavily
burdened with the ordinary duties of the ministry: instructing those
already within the fold, administering the sacraments, building temples,
schools, and asylums--duties which must be attended to and which
leave slight leisure for special studies or special labors. Father Hecker
organized the Paulist community, and did in his way a great work for
the conversion of the country. He made no mistake when he planned
for a body of priests, more disciplined than usually are the parochial
clergy, and more supple in the character of their institute than the
existing religious orders.
We shall always distinguish Isaac Thomas Hecker as the ornament, the
flower of our American priesthood--the type that we wish to see
reproduced among us in widest proportions. Ameliorations may be
sought for in details, and the more of them the better for religion; but
the great lines of Father Hecker's personality we should guard with
jealous love in the formation of the future priestly characters of
America.
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THE LIFE OF FATHER HECKER ________________________
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
TOWARDS the close of the eighteenth century a German clockmaker

named Engel Freund, accompanied by his wife and children, left his
native town of Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia, to seek a new home in
America. There is a family tradition to the effect that his forefathers
were French, and that they came into Germany on account of some
internal commotion in their own country. The name makes it more
probable that they were Alsatians who quietly moved across the Rhine,
either when their province was first ceded to France, or perhaps later, at
the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. When Engel
Freund quitted Germany the disturbing influences of the French
Revolution may have had a considerable share in determining his
departure. He landed at New York in 1797 and established himself in
Hester Street, between Christie and Forsyth.
His wife, born Ann Elizabeth Schneider, in 1764, was a native of
Frankenburg, Hesse Cassel. She became the mother of a son and
several daughters, who attained maturity and settled in New York. As
his girls grew into womanhood and married, Engel Freund, who was a
thrifty and successful tradesman in his prime, dowered each of them
with a house in his own neighborhood, seeking thus to perpetuate in the
new the kindly patriarchal customs of the old land.
To the New-Yorker of to-day, or, indeed, to any reputable and
industrious immigrant, the notion of settling a family in Hester Street
could not seem other than grotesque. It is now the filthy and swarming
centre of a very low population. The Jewish pedlar _par éminence_
lives there and thereabouts. Signs painted in the characters of his race,
not of his accidental nationality, abound on every side. Here a
synagogue occupies the story above a shop; there Masonic symbols are
exhibited between the windows in a similar location. Jewish faces of
the least prepossessing type look askance into eyes which they
recognize as both unfamiliar and observant. Women, unkempt and
slouchy, or else arrayed in dubious finery, brush against one. At
intervals fast growing greater the remains of an extinct domesticity and
privacy still show themselves in the shape of old-fashioned brick or
wooden houses with Dutch gables or Queen Anne fronts, but for the
most part tall tenement-houses, their lower stories uniformly given