the audience
loudly applauded Luther's name, and some one called for three cheers
for him, which were given vociferously, especially by the students.
Father Hecker smiled, waited till the noise was over, then bade them
give him a fair hearing; which, of course, they did. Before he had
concluded, his audience seemed won to his view of the question in
hand, and showed it by the names and the sentiments applauded. At the
end some one called out "Three cheers for Father Hecker!" and they
were given most heartily.

There seems nothing like a new discovery, as we have already said, in
Father Hecker's controversial matter, or even in the method of its
treatment. But joined with its exponent, blended into his
personality, as it was, by the sincerity of his conviction, it was a
discovery; flavored and tinctured by him, this wayside fountain had a
new life-giving power to both Catholics and non-Catholics. Bishops,
priests, and Catholic men and women in the world heard him with mute
attention. Some Catholics, it is true, were stunned by his bold
handling of those traditional touch-me-nots of conservatism--reason
and liberty; and such drew off suspicious. But multitudes of
Catholics felt that he opened up to full view the dim vistas of truth
towards which they had long been groping; these could agree with him
without an effort. A few had reached his stand-point before they knew
him, and hailed with rapture the leader who, unlike themselves, was
not kept back by either dread of novel-sounding terms or by the
impotency of private station. But here and there he met Catholics as
dead-set against him as the Judaizing converts had been against his
patron, St. Paul. Their only love was for antiquity, and that they
loved passionately and in all its forms, even the neo-antiquity of
the controversy of the Reformation era. On the other hand many, when
they heard him, said, "That is the kind of Catholic I am, and the
only kind it is easy for me to be." Non-Catholics, earnest men and
women, were often heard to say, _"If I were quite sure that Hecker is
a genuine Roman Catholic_ I think that I could be one myself"; and
this some of them did not hesitate to publish in the newspapers, so
that Father Hecker might have said with Job: "The ear that heard me
blessed me, and the eye that saw me gave witness to me."

Father Hecker felt that he was a pioneer in thus dealing with
rationalized Protestants. His eye was quick to see the signs of the
break