ther to Catholics or to non-Catholics, one must learn
how, and Father Hecker with all his gifts knew that this gift seldom
comes from above except by way of reward for steady labor. The
opportunity of the missions, and of Father Bernard as a guide, was
eagerly accepted in lieu of the prison chaplaincy.

The missions also enabled him to know the Catholic people. The
non-Catholics he already knew from vivid recollection of his own
former state and from that of his early surroundings; Brook Farm and
Fruitlands had completed his knowledge of the outside world; but the
Redemptorist novitiate and studentate and his sojourn in England did
not give him a similar knowledge of the Catholic people, priesthood,
and hierarchy. To the average looker-on Catholicity is what Catholics
are, and Catholics in America viewed from a standpoint of morality
were then and still are a very mixed population. Why the fruits are
worse than the tree is a sore perplexity even to expert
controversialists, and Father Hecker had need to equip himself well
for meeting that difficulty, a patent one in the rushing tide of
stricken immigrants then pouring into America. The missions are an
unequalled school for learning men. All men and women in a parish are
made known to the missionary, for they walk or stumble through his
very soul.

Nor can one fail to see the use of missions as an evidence to the
non-Catholic public itself of the supernatural power of Catholicity
over men's lives. To practical people like Americans there is no oral
or written evidence of the true religion so valid as the spectacle of
its power to change bad men into good ones. Such a people will accept
arguments from history and from Scripture, but those of a moral kind
they demand; they must see the theories at work. A mission is a
microcosm of the church as a moral force. It shows a powerful grasp
of human nature and an easy supremacy over it. It is an energetic,
calm, and clean-sweeping influence for good, bold in its choice of
the most sublime truths of supernatural religion as the sole motives
of repentance. And it uniformly achieves so complete a victory over
the best-entrenched vices that non-Catholic prejudice is invariably
shaken at the spectacle. And in America the pioneer work of the
apostolate must be to remove prejudice. The character of the men who
conduct these exercises, their courage, intelligence, devotedness,
discipline, and ready command of the people; the indiscrim