He was chagrined at the apathy he sometimes met with among Catholics concerning the American apostolate. He found priests who would devote much labor to collecting money for the propagation of the faith among distant heathen races, but very few who would make a serious effort for the conversion of their American fellow-citizens. Are Americans of less worth in God's eyes than pagans and Buddhists? he would ask. He thought no differently of the people of the United States than St. Paul did of the Corinthians and Macedonians, groaning and travailing with them to bring them forth members of Christ; or than St. Francis Xavier did of the Japanese.
If asked how he was going to convert people, he would answer: "I am a Catholic, and I know that I am right. I can prove that I am right. What more do I want than this, and honest men and women who will listen to me?" The confidence he had in the strength of the Catholic argument was absolute, and this he showed by his zeal. His sole study was how to transmute this force into missionary form. Of all the wonders of the intellectual world he felt that the greatest is the faith of Catholics, and he knew by the lesson of his early life that it is but slightly appreciated by the non-Catholic mind. That Catholics permit this ignorance to continue was a puzzle to him. And it was all the more annoying because any single one of them can multiply his influence indefinitely by his union with the most perfect organism ever known—the Catholic Church. The quiescence of a body of men, sincere and intelligent, infallibly certain of the means of obtaining eternal happiness, living in daily contact with other men ignorant and inquiring about this unspeakable privilege, and yet not taking instant measures to impart their knowledge, was to Father Hecker almost as great a wonder as the divine gift of faith itself, especially as Catholics are well furnished with leaders and are organized to spread the truth as one of their most sacred duties.
Mr. Wilfrid Ward, a Catholic philosophical writer of distinction, has explained in a brilliant little volume the influence upon controversy of what he styles The Clothes of Religion—race, political traditions, education, physical temperament. He puts into his instructive pages the sense of the great scholastic maxim, Quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur—Whatever is received, is received according to the mode (or character) of the recipient. The national character, the tendencies, the antecedents of the people addressed, the relative power of thought and of emotion in their mental activity; all these are not, indeed, the souls of men but the clothing of them, their armor and their weapons; and Father Hecker felt that such things must be taken into account in dealing with people, and that with the utmost discretion. His view about controversy with non-Catholics was indeed aggressive—that we had reached the point in the battle at which the legion, having cast its javelins, rushes on with drawn swords to closer conflict. But the combatants should be well trained, the captains should know the ground to be traversed, should understand thoroughly the weakness and strength of the enemy. It was not a new thing to bring Protestantism into court at the suit of human liberty. But it was a novelty to attack Protestantism as the very torture-chamber of free and innocent souls, and to do it in such a way as to draw thousands of the best Protestants in the land to listen. Such sentences in the morning papers as "An overflowing house greeted Father Hecker," "The immense hall has seldom been so completely filled," "Representative men of all creeds and of none were scattered through the large audience," had a tremendous meaning when the lecturer was known to be the most fearless assailant of Protestantism who had appeared for many a day.
Father Hecker well knew that the non-Catholic American aspires to deal with God through the aid of as few exterior appliances as possible. To come near God by his own spiritual activity without halting at forms of human contrivance is his spiritual ambition. His religious joy is in a spiritual life which deals with God directly, His inspired Word, His Holy Spirit. Father Hecker longed to tell his fellow-countrymen that the Catholic Church gives them a flight to God a thousand times more direct than they ever dreamed of. They think that the authority of the Church will cramp their limbs; he was eager to explain to them that it sets them free, clears the mind of doubt, intensifies conviction into instinctive certitude, quickens the intellectual faculties into an activity whose force is unknown outside the Church.
It was not with the truths of revelation alone that Father Hecker dealt in his lectures. The first principles of natural religion were the background of all his pictures of true Christianity: that God is good, that men will be punished only for their personal misdeeds, that men are born for union with God and in their best moments long for Him, that they are equal, being all made in the Divine image, endowed with free will and called to the one eternal happiness—such were the great truths with which he would impress his audience first of all, using them afterwards as terms of comparison with Protestant doctrine. This plan he followed rather than institute a comparison of historical claims or of Biblical credentials, the well-trodden but weary road of ordinary controversy. To him Protestantism was more an offence against the integrity of human nature than even against the truths of Christian revelation. And he would place Catholicity in a new light, that of reason and liberty.
The revolt of Protestantism was not more against God's external authority among men than it was against the equal brotherhood of the human race. Well done, Luther, Father Hecker would say, well and consistently done; when you have proclaimed man totally depraved you have properly made his religion a Cain-like flight from the face of his Maker and his kindred by your doctrine of predestination. Father Hecker deemed it plainly unwise to forego the advantages of attacking such vulnerable points as the Protestant errors of total depravity and predestination for the sake of dwelling on the Biblical and historical credentials of Church authority. He knew, indeed, that extravagant individualism is to this day a fundamental Protestant error, but the waning power of its doctrinal assertion has deprived it of aggressive vigor. There is less danger of its assault upon the Church, Father Hecker thought, than of its sceptical tendency upon its own adherents. To emphasize the obligation of organic unity, in such a condition of things, was not good tactics; it was to revive the spirit of resistance without arresting the evils of doubt. Authority in religion has high and undoubted claims; but it is nevertheless true that the normal development of man is in freedom. Man is fitted for his destiny in proportion to his ability to use his liberty with wisdom, and Father Hecker endeavored to set non-Catholics themselves to work removing the obstacles to true spiritual liberty which Protestantism had planted in the way.
An appeal from Luther and Calvin to the standards of rational nature, to human virtue, to human equality, rather than to exclusively Catholic standards, was certain of success in a large class of minds. And this but led to the consideration of the Church's claims to elevate rational nature and natural virtue to that divine order which is above nature, and which is organic in the Catholic Church. Moral rectitude is a simpler test of truth than texts from a dead book, whose original tongues and whose perplexed exegesis are quite unknown to the vast mass of mankind. And Father Hecker recognized that the elementary truths of reason and the aspirations of humanity for better things are not unknown to any man or woman; these are everybody's personal means of testing truth. To pass them by in order to apply the remoter test of revelation is either to admit that Protestantism is not against the dictates of reason and man's aspirations, or to commence the argument against it at the wrong end.
In a letter to Cardinal Barnabo written in July, 1863, Father Hecker gives an account of how he went to work to secure and interest a non-Catholic audience:
"For several years past it has seemed to me that some more effectual means should be taken to reach the Protestant community. This last winter I ventured with this view upon an experiment. In three different cities I gave, in a large public hall, a course of conferences on religion, one every evening from Sunday to Sunday inclusive. The expense of the hall was paid by the priest of the place, the lectures were all free, and addressed exclusively to Protestants. The halls were crowded at each place, and that my audiences might be such as I desired to address, I begged Catholics to stay away. At the close of one of my lectures there were present twenty-five hundred persons, chiefly Protestants.
"My method was as follows: In treating any doctrine of our holy faith with a view to convincing my audience, I considered first what want in our nature it was related to, and to which it addressed itself. This want being discovered, I developed and illustrated it until my hearers were fully convinced of its existence and importance. Then the question came up, Which religion recognizes this element or want of our nature, and meets all its legitimate demands? Does Protestantism? Its answers were given, and found either hostile or incomplete. Then the Catholic Church was interrogated: and she was found to recognize this want, and her answers adequate and satisfactory. These answers were then shown to be supported by the authority of Holy Scriptures.