a town on a lecture tour he always put up at the house of the
resident priest, if there was one, and, if he stayed over Sunday,
preached for him at High Mass. He invariably corresponded beforehand
with the pastor of the town to which he was invited by a secular
lecture society, requesting him to send complimentary tickets to the
leading men of the place--lawyers, doctors, ministers, merchants, and
politicians. And when he appeared on the platform it was always in
company with the priest. He loved priests with all his might and was
ever at home in their company. It is not very singular, therefore,
that some of his most devoted friends and most ardent admirers were
priests, secular and religious, born and bred in the Old World--among
them some of the most prominent clergymen in the country.

Father Hecker often met non-Catholics in private, being sought out by
prominent radicals, sceptics, unbelievers, and humanitarians. What
they had heard from him in public lectures, or read of him in the
press, drew them to him, or they were brought to see him by mutual
friends. And here he was indeed powerful, overbearing resistance by
the strength of conviction and the simple exhibition of Catholic
truth. The sight of a man anywhere, whom he could but suspect of
aptitude for his views, was the signal for his emphatic affirmation
of them, sometimes leading him to controversy bordering on the
vociferous on cars and steamboats. In such circumstances, and in all
his other dealings with men, you saw his prompt intelligence, his
fine sensibility, his lofty spirit, his forceful and occasionally
imperious will to hold you to the point; but the quality which, both
in public and private discourse, outshone all, or rather gave all
light and direction, was an immense love of truth joined to an equal
admiration for virtue.

________________________

CHAPTER XXX

THE APOSTOLATE OF THE PRESS

ONE Sunday forenoon, happening to cross Broadway near a fashionable
Protestant church, we saw the curb on both sides of the street lined
with carriages, and the coachmen and footmen all reading the morning
papers. The rich master and his family were in the softly-cushioned
pews indoors, while their servants studied the news of the world and
worshipped at the shrine of the Press outside: a spectacle suggestive
of many things to the social reformer. But to a religious mind it was
an invitation to the _Apostolate of the Press._ The Philips of our
da