tion in the world, and consecrated it to God by making its
cares and duties subservient to divine purposes.

"The house of St. Joseph was his cloister, and in the bosom of his
family he practised the sublimest virtues. While occupied with the
common daily duties of life his mind was fixed on the contemplation
of divine truths, thus breathing into all his actions a heavenly
influence. He attained in society and in human relationships a degree
of perfection not surpassed, if equalled, by the martyr's death, the
contemplative of the solitude, the cloistered monk, or the missionary
hero.

"Our age is not an age of martyrdom, nor an age of hermits, nor a
monastic age. Although it has its martyrs, its recluses, and its
monastic communities, these are not, and are not likely to be, its
prevailing types of Christian perfection. Our age lives in its busy
marts, in counting-rooms, in workshops, in homes, and in the varied
relations that form human society, and it is into these that sanctity
is to be introduced. St. Joseph stands forth as an excellent and
unsurpassed model of this type of perfection. These duties and these
opportunities must be made instrumental in sanctifying the soul. For
it is the difficulties and the hindrances that men find in their age
which give the form to their character and habits, and when mastered
become the means of divine grace and their titles to glory. Indicate
these, and you portray that type of sanctity in which the life of the
Church will find its actual and living expression.

"This, then, is the field of conquest for the heroic Christian of our
day. Out of the cares, toils, duties, afflictions, and responsibilities
of daily life are to be built the pillars of sanctity of the Stylites
of our age. This is the coming form of the triumph of Christian
virtue."

With all, moreover, Father Hecker insisted on the practice of the
natural virtues, honesty, temperance, truthfulness, kindliness.
courage, and manliness generally, as preceding any practical move
towards the higher life. He first explored the character and life of
his penitent in search of what natural power he had, and then
demanded its full exertion. He began with the natural man, and made
every supernatural force in the sacraments and prayer aid in
establishing and increasing natural virtue as a necessary preliminary
and ever-present accompaniment of supernatural progress. Perhaps
Father Hecker's antipathy to Calvinism sharpened his