ality. "Now I live, yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me." An author much admired by Father Hecker thus describes
the effects produced in the soul by supernatural faith, and hope, and
love:

"These virtues are called and in reality are _Divine_ virtues. They
are called thus not because they are related to God in general, but
because _they unite us in a divine manner with God,_ have Him for
their immediate motive, and can be produced in us only by a
communication of the Divine nature. . . . For the life that the
children of God lead here upon earth must be of the same kind as the
life that awaits them in heaven." (Scheeben's _Glories of Divine
Grace,_ p. 222; Benziger Bros.)

To partake thus of the inner life of God was Father Hecker's one
spiritual ambition, and to help others to it his one motive for
dealing with men. He was ever insisting upon the closeness of the
divine union, and that it is our life brought into actual touch with
God, whose supreme and essential activity must, by a law of its own
existence, make itself felt, dominate as far as permitted the entire
activity of the soul, and win more and more upon its life till all is
won. Then are fulfilled the Apostle's words: "But we all beholding
the glory of the Lord _with open face_ are transformed into the same
image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor.
3:18).

Here are some of Father Hecker's words, printed but a year or two
before his death, which treat not only of the interior life in
general, but in particular of its relation to the outer action of God
on the soul through the divine organism of the Church:

"St. Thomas Aquinas attributes the absence of spiritual joy mainly to
neglect of consciousness of the inner life. 'During this life,' he
says (_Opuscula de Beatitudine,_ cap. iii.), 'we should continually
rejoice in God, as something perfectly fitting, in all our actions
and for all our actions, in all our gifts and for all our gifts. It
is, as Isaias declares, that we may particularly enjoy him that the
Son of God has been given to us. What blindness and what gross
stupidity for many who are always seeking God, always sighing for
Him, frequently desiring Him, daily knocking and clamoring at the
door for God by prayer, while they themselves are all the time, as
the apostle says, temples of the living God, and God truly dwelling
within them; while all the time their souls are the abiding-place of
God, wherein He continually repos