With all, moreover, Father Hecker insisted on the practice of the natural virtues, honesty, temperance, truthfulness, kindliness. courage, and manliness generally, as preceding any practical move towards the higher life. He first explored the character and life of his penitent in search of what natural power he had, and then demanded its full exertion. He began with the natural man, and made every supernatural force in the sacraments and prayer aid in establishing and increasing natural virtue as a necessary preliminary and ever-present accompaniment of supernatural progress. Perhaps Father Hecker's antipathy to Calvinism sharpened his zeal for the natural virtues, and strengthened his advocacy of human innocence. The craving for the supernatural, he was convinced, would be strong in proportion to the enlightenment of the natural reason; the need of the grace of God is, of course, most urgent in a sinful state, but it would be more quickly perceived in proportion to the possession of natural virtue. As the exercise of reason is necessary to faith and precedes its acts, so the integrity of natural virtue is the best preparation for the grace of God. Many pages of The Aspirations of Nature, from which the following brief quotations are made, are devoted to the dignity of humanity and the need of placing the excellence of human nature in the foreground when considering how man may attain to a high supernatural state:
"Every faculty of the soul, rightly exercised, leads to truth; every instinct of our nature has an eternal destiny attached to it. Catholicity finds its support in these and employs them in all her developments."
"The Catholic religion is wonderfully calculated and adapted to call forth, sustain, and perfect the tastes, propensities, and peculiarities of human nature. And let no one venture to say that these characteristics which are everywhere found among men are to be repressed rather than encouraged. This is to despise human nature, this is to mar the work of God. For are not these peculiarities inborn? Are they not implanted in us by the hand of our Creator? Are they not what go to constitute our very individuality?"
Humanity is a word of vague meaning to most ears, but to Father
Hecker its meaning was a living thing of value second only to
Christianity. Here is his summary of the relation of Catholicity to
human nature, taken from the same source as the foregoing:
"Catholicity is that religion which links itself to all the faculties of the mind, appropriates all the instincts of human nature, and by thus concurring with the work of the Creator affirms its own Divine origin."
We give the following extracts from letters of spiritual advice, to show Father Hecker's views of mortification:
"Exterior mortifications are aids to interior life. What we take from the body we give to the spirit. If we will look at it closely, two-thirds of our time is taken up with what we shall eat, and how we shall sleep, and wherewithal we shall be clothed. Two-thirds of our life and more is animal—including sleep. I do not despise the animal in man, but I go in for fair play for the soul. The better part should have the greater share. The right order of things has been reversed: con-version is necessary. Read the lives of the old Fathers of the Desert. They determined on leading a rational and divine life. How little are they known or appreciated in our day! Their lives are more interesting than a novel and stranger than a romance."
"Self-love, self-activity, self-hood, is something not easily destroyed. It is like a cancer which has its roots extending to the most delicate fibres of our mental and moral nature. Divine grace can draw them all out. But how slowly! And how exquisitely painful is the process—the more subtle the self-love the more painful the cure."
"Never practise any mortification of a considerable character without counsel. The devil, when he can no longer keep us back, aims at driving us too far and too fast."
"How can the intellect be brought under direction of divine grace except by reducing it to its nothingness?—and how can this be done except by placing it in utter darkness? How can the heart be filled with the spirit of divine love while it contains any other? How can it be purified of all other inordinate love except by dryness and bitterness? God wishes to fill our intelligence and our hearts with divine light and love, and thus to deify our whole nature—to make us one with what we represent—God. And how can He do this otherwise than by removing from our soul and its faculties all that is contrary to the divine order?"