ry,
together with a strong personal affection for the holy man who showed
religion to be a most happy as well as most reasonable service of
God. To his penitents in the confessional he was ever most kind and
patient. "No school of perfection," he once said, "can equal the
self-denial necessary to hear confessions well." God is now rewarding
him, we trust, for the cheerful, often even bantering, words of
encouragement he gave to the multitudes of poor sinners who knelt at
his feet during the toilsome years he spent on the missions; and for
the enlightenment and encouragement of his big-hearted influence, and
for his trumpet notes of hope in the early morning instructions.
After the hard pounding of the night sermons it is always sought to
pick the sinner up out of the dust and to hearten him by the early
instructions, as well as to guide him to the precise methods and
means of reform and of a good life for the future. As to the
sacrament of penance, the saying of St. Alphonsus is a maxim with us
all: "Be a lion in the pulpit, but a lamb in the confessional."

The reader must indulge us in thus dwelling so long on the Catholic
missions, for we are inclined to say many words of praise of so
lovely a life, in which the same men sow and reap a great harvest in
the same week, expend their vitality in preaching the word and
administering the sacraments and comforting sinners who are wholly
broken down with the truest contrition.

In 1851 the American Redemptorists had before them a missionary field
almost untouched. Public retreats had been given from time to time in
the United States by Jesuits and others, but the mission opened at
St. Joseph's Church, New York City, on Passion Sunday, 1851, was the
first mission of a regular series carried on systematically by a body
of men especially devoted to the vocation. The merit of inaugurating
them is chiefly due to Father Bernard, who had no hesitation in
getting to work with his three American fathers; though Father Joseph
Mueller, rector of the Third Street convent, and Rev. Joseph McCarron,
the rector of St. Joseph's Church, had something to do in arranging
the details and in facilitating the work. Several Redemptorists from
Third Street helped in the confessionals.*

[* Observers of coincidences will be interested to notice the arrival
of the missionaries in America on St. Joseph's day, under the
Provincial Bernard Joseph Hafkenscheid, to open their first mission
at St. Jose