sm
into court at the suit of human liberty. But it was a novelty to
attack Protestantism as the very torture-chamber of free and
innocent souls, and to do it in such a way as to draw thousands of
the best Protestants in the land to listen. Such sentences in the
morning papers as "An overflowing house greeted Father Hecker," "The
immense hall has seldom been so completely filled," "Representative
men of all creeds and of none were scattered through the large
audience," had a tremendous meaning when the lecturer was known to be
the most fearless assailant of Protestantism who had appeared for
many a day.

Father Hecker well knew that the non-Catholic American aspires to
deal with God through the aid of as few exterior appliances as
possible. To come near God by his own spiritual activity without
halting at forms of human contrivance is his spiritual ambition. His
religious joy is in a spiritual life which deals with God directly,
His inspired Word, His Holy Spirit. Father Hecker longed to tell his
fellow-countrymen that the Catholic Church gives them a flight to God
a thousand times more direct than they ever dreamed of. They think
that the authority of the Church will cramp their limbs; he was eager
to explain to them that it sets them free, clears the mind of doubt,
intensifies conviction into instinctive certitude, quickens the
intellectual faculties into an activity whose force is unknown
outside the Church.

It was not with the truths of revelation alone that Father Hecker
dealt in his lectures. The first principles of natural religion were
the background of all his pictures of true Christianity: that God is
good, that men will be punished only for their personal misdeeds,
that men are born for union with God and in their best moments long
for Him, that they are equal, being all made in the Divine image,
endowed with free will and called to the one eternal happiness--such
were the great truths with which he would impress his audience first
of all, using them afterwards as terms of comparison with Protestant
doctrine. This plan he followed rather than institute a comparison of
historical claims or of Biblical credentials, the well-trodden but
weary road of ordinary controversy. To him Protestantism was more an
offence against the integrity of human nature than even against the
truths of Christian revelation. And he would place Catholicity in a
new light, that of reason and liberty.

The revolt of Protestantism wa