all the varieties of mind and character and
circumstance. If collisions and misunderstandings often come between
those who have the same great end in view, this is the result of
human infirmity, and only shows how imperfect and partial are human
wisdom and human virtue."

What Father Hewit adds of Father Baker's dispositions applies as well
to all the Fathers. In ceasing to be Redemptorists, they did not
swerve from their original purpose in becoming religious. None of
them had grown discontented with his state or with his superiors.
They were all in the full fervor of the devotional spirit of the
community, and as missionaries were generously wearing out their
lives in the toil and hardship of its peculiar vocation. But both
parties became the instruments of a special providence, which made
use of the wide diversities of temperament existing among men, and
set apart Father Hecker and his companions, after a season of severe
trial, for a new apostolate. They did not choose it for themselves.
Father Hecker had aspirations, as we know, but he did not dream of
realizing them through any separation whatever. But Providence led
the Holy See to change what had been a violent wrench into a peaceful
division, exercising, in so doing, a divine authority accepted with
equal obedience by all concerned.

What Father Hewit further says of Father Baker applies exactly to
Father Hecker:

"For the Congregation in which he was trained to the religious and
ecclesiastical state he always retained a sincere esteem and
affection. He did not ask the Pope for a dispensation from his vows
in order to be relieved from a burdensome obligation, but only on the
condition that it seemed best to him to terminate the difficulty
which had arisen that way. When the dispensation was granted he did
not change his life for a more easy one. . . Let no one, therefore,
who is disposed to yield to temptations against his vocation, and to
abandon the religious state from weariness, tepidity, or any unworthy
motive, think to find any encouragement in his example; for his
austere, self-denying, and arduous life will give him only rebuke,
and not encouragement."

After the expulsion the General begged Father Hecker to make the
convent his home till he was suited elsewhere, and Father Hecker,
having thanked him for his kindness and stayed there that night, took
lodgings the following day in a quiet street near the Propaganda.
During the seven months of his s