this was joy and gladness to many a weary heart
drawn to the Church by her charities, or her beautiful symbolism, yet
hindered by the phantom of absolute authority and the dread of losing
the integrity of free citizenship. Incivism--will Catholic apologists
never learn it?--is the heaviest stone flung at the Church in all
free lands to-day. Father Hecker's blood fairly boiled that the
Church of Christ, the very home of Christian freedom, and the
nursing-mother of all civil well-being, should be thus assailed,
while Calvin's and Luther's degrading doctrines should be paraded as
alone worthy of a free people.

To say that Father Hecker "Americanized" in the narrow sense would be
to do him injustice. The American ideas to which he appealed he knew
to be God's will for all civilized peoples of our time. If
fundamentally American they were not for that reason exclusively
American. His Americanism is so broad that by a change of place it
can be made Spanish, or German; and a slight change of terms makes it
religious and Catholic. Nor had form of government essentially to do
with it; human equality cannot be monopolized by republics; it can be
rightly understood in a monarchy, though in such a ease it does not
assume the conspicuous place which it does in a republic. It was this
broadness of Father Hecker's Americanism that made him acceptable to
the extremely conservative circles of Rome, in his struggle there in
the winter of 1858-9. Many men in the monarchies of the old World may
doubt the advent of republicanism there, but what sensible man
anywhere doubts the aspiration of all races towards liberty and
intelligence?

Father Hecker's repertory covered the entire ground between
scepticism and Catholicism. In refutation of Protestantism the
principal lectures were: _The Church and the Republic; Luther and the
Reformation; How and Why I Became a Catholic, or A Search after
Rational Christianity;_ and _The State of Religion in the United
States._ On the positive side his chief topics were: The Church as a
Society, Why We Invoke the Saints, and the Sacraments of Penance and
Holy Communion. Others he had against materialism, spiritualism, etc.

As may naturally be supposed, some of his lectures succeeded better
than others. One of those he personally preferred was _The Churrk and
the Republic._ He opened by affirming, as the fundamental principle
of the American nation, that man is naturally virtuous enough to be
capable of