me, I regret nothing so much as that I have not a
thousand lives to sacrifice to His service and love. Yes, I love you
all more than I ever did, and I would count nothing as a cost for
your present and eternal good. Yet, by the grace of God, I love my
Saviour infinitely, infinitely, infinitely more. Alas! when will
those who profess to be Christians learn the significance of Christ's
Gospels and His blessed example. I am not ignorant nor insensible of
the love we owe to our parents and relatives--no, I am not insensible
of this love; but in me it is all in Christ, as I would wish yours
were. . . . I embrace you, dear brother, in the love of our crucified
Lord."

"DEAR MOTHER: There have been times when, considering the wickedness
of the world, sensible of its miseries and my own, and at the same
time beholding obscurely and as it were tasting the things of heaven,
I have longed and wished to be separated from the body. But when
coming back to myself, and thinking that with the aid of grace I can
still increase in God's love and hence love Him still more in
consequence for all eternity, I feel willing to love and suffer until
the last day, if by this I should acquire but one drop more of Divine
love in my heart. And so it is, as St. Paul declares, that we should
count the trials here as nothing compared with the glory that awaits
us. Now, all these considerations, dear mother, join together to
increase my desire to see you in the communion of the Holy Catholic
Church, to which God has singularly given so many means of growing in
grace," etc., etc.

Notwithstanding these marks of active intelligence, Brother Hecker
could not study, except by fits and starts. Often he could not get
through the common prayers, and in ordinary conversation his tongue
would sometimes be tangled among the words of a sentence before he
was half through with it. The reader has already learned that the
penalties of utter stupidity were not unknown to the unwritten law of
the Wittem studentate, notwithstanding that the young men were devout
religious; and hence Brother Hecker must have had many hours of
anguish. But we cannot suppose that his native cheerfulness was quite
suppressed. His dulness of mind was accompanied, or rather was the
result of, the close embraces of Divine love. It was the bitter part
of that intimate communion with God which is granted to chosen souls.
No doubt he was profoundly humiliated by the disgrace involved in his