degree with the fulness or the
spontaneity of His own interior action in souls.

The exterior action is one of control and of verification, to hinder
souls from being lost in the depths of illusion and in the deceits of
pride. But besides this, humility, obedience, self-abnegation,
virtues dear by excellence to the heart of Jesus Christ, are
impossible without due submission to the external authority. When one
believes only in himself, he obeys only himself, and hence has never
practised complete renunciation nor complete humility.

Father Hecker also maintained that the direction of souls in
confession should be made to strengthen and develop individual life.
We do not need blood-letting, he said, as if we suffered from
plethora, but rather we need a course of tonics, sea-baths, and the
invigorating air of the mountains. We should not hold our penitents
in leading-strings, but should teach them to live a self-reliant life
under the direction of the Holy Spirit. Souls tempered by that
process would render the Church a thousand times more service than
they do now.

No doubt such souls may sometimes run the risk of pride and of
temptation to revolt. But in such cases the Church is so provided
with power by the dogma of infallibility, as proclaimed by the
Vatican Council, as to be able to counteract this danger without
serious loss, as was proved in the case of Doellinger and the Old
Catholics.

The Holy Spirit, preparing for a great development of individual
life, has made provision beforehand that the Church should be armed
with power sufficient to repress all waywardness, and this was done
by the Vatican Council. Some had feared that the definition of
infallibility would introduce an extravagant use of authority, and
lead to a diminution of reasonable liberty and individuality in the
Church even greater than before. But the very contrary has been the
result.

With reference to the interior life, I can affirm that Father
Hecker's was full and rich. Having spent the greater part of his life
in a devouring activity, at its close he lived as a true
contemplative. He was a genuine mystic. We heard him discourse with
marvellous beauty on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist,
expounding these great truths in a way not only to enrapture one with
their splendor, but utterly to refute deism, pantheism, and
materialism. The latter error, he said, owed its introduction partly
to the fact that Protestantism had refuse