es of the visible Church from that
teacher who has no master among men. At the same time Rome sent forth
in the person of Father Hecker a living and powerful argument
addressed to this Republic, that the Catholic Church is worthy of the
heartiest allegiance of our citizens.

This providential aspect of the case should not be forgotten. When
Father Hecker had been expelled from the Redemptorists it might have
been thought that he was done for, and that if he had ever had a
mission it had suffered total shipwreck, whether deserved or not. But
in reality the very reverse was the truth. The disgrace of expulsion,
the sudden horror of being thus cast out, a calamity which set him
forth to all Catholics as a ruined priest, had but served to bring
him into the notice of the supreme authority of the Church. And when
in this God had wrought all His work His servant was purified within
and mightily strengthened without. In his inmost soul he was
conscious of his divine mission with a deeper certitude than ever
before; and as he began his apostolate he bore on his arm the buckler
of Rome, against which all the darts of enemies, if any should arise,
would strike harmless and fall to the ground.

It was fitting that the Paulist community, appealing to the men and
women of to-day with the credentials as well of their own individual
independence as of the good will of the Pope and the Bishops, should
be launched into existence from the very deck of Peter's bark, and
furnished with all the testimonials of ecclesiastical authority short
of canonical sanction. This was the more proper because, in a few
years after the beginning of the community, European revolutionists
were to be scourged with the Syllabus, whose every word agonized the
souls of unworthy advocates of liberty. That Pontifical document has
created a literature of its own in comment and explanation, some
tying more knots in every lash and others mitigating its severity or
palliating the errors it smote with such pitiless rigor. But the best
interpretation of the Syllabus is the Paulist community. It is a body
of free men whose origin was the joint result of the personal
workings of the Holy Spirit in the soul of a man who loved civil and
political freedom with a mighty love, and the decision of the highest
court of Catholicity declaring him worthy of trust as an exponent of
the Christian faith. If the Syllabus shows what the Church thinks of
those who in the guise of free