ing up of dogmatic Protestantism, and he was early out among the
vast intellectual wreckage, endeavoring to catch and tow into port
what fragments he could of a system founded on doubt and on the
denial of human virtue and human intelligence. "I want," he said on
one occasion in private, "to open the way to the Church to
rationalists. It seems to me to be now closed up. I feel that I am a
pioneer in opening and leading the way. _I smuggled myself into the
Church,_ and so did Brownson." And now he wanted to abolish the
custom-house, and open the harbor wide and clear for the entrance
into the Church of all men who had been forced back on reason alone
for guidance. The words above italicised were uttered with powerful
emphasis and with much feeling. He quoted the following saying of
Ozanam with emphatic approval: "What the age needs is an
intellectual crusade"; and he affirmed that Leo XIII. had done very
much to aid us in preaching it, and that Pius IX., rightly
understood, had led the way to it. "The Catholics I would help with
my left hand, the Protestants with my right hand," he once said. And
non-Catholics, all but the bigots, liked him, for he was frank and
true by every test. He was neither an exotic nor a hybrid, and they
felt at home with him. He much resembled the best type of public men
in America who have achieved fame at the bar or in politics; indeed,
as we have already intimated, he really belonged to that type, for
all his studies and all his training in the Catholic schools and
convents, which had given him more and more of truth, more and more
of the grace of God, had not changed the kind or type of man to which
he belonged. He was the same character as when he harangued the
Seventh Ward voters, or discussed the Divine Transcendence at Brook
Farm. Scholastic truth sank deep into his soul, but scholastic
methods stuck on the surface and then dropped away. "And David having
girded his sword upon his armor began to try if he could walk in
armor, for he was not accustomed to it. And David said to Saul, I
cannot go thus, for I am not used to it. And he laid them off. And he
took his staff which he had always in his hands, and chose him five
smooth stones out of the brook."

If his duties in the Paulist community and parish had allowed, Father
Hecker could have lectured to large audiences during the greater part
of the year, and been well paid for his labor. He soon became the
foremost exponent of Catholicity