"The interest shown by my audience was remarkable, and the effect of this method was equal to my hopes. My experience convinces me that, if this work were continued, it would prepare the way for a great change of religion in this country, more particularly at the present time, when the public mind is favorably disposed to consider the claims of the Catholic Church."
The "want in our nature" appealed to was often in the political order, such as the love of liberty or man's capacity for self-government. This he dwelt upon at considerable length in the opening part of his lecture, viewing it as a philosopher would, and extending its application, as far as possible, to men generally. He thus chose his criterion for comparison of the two claimants in the religious world. His triumph was, therefore, often in an arena only semi-religious, or rather in that of natural religion. The effect was wonderfully good, though doubtless due in great measure to the manner in which his plan, so simply sketched in the letter above quoted, was developed before the audience. The entire doubting body of intelligent men was enlisted in varying degrees in favor of the Catholic teaching of man's relation to God and to his fellow-men, and against Protestantism. Americans could not help feeling disgust for doctrines which were condemned by the maxims of the Declaration of Independence.
Although there was nothing positively new in the method—something like it had been used by Archbishop Hughes against the Presbyterian champion, Breckenridge—yet the public was taken by surprise. The style of controversy universally in vogue was that of setting up texts of Scripture and bowling them down with other texts. But here comes an American Catholic and arraigns Protestant doctrine at the tribunal of American liberty. The thick-and-thin Protestant was thrown into a rage, and became abusive and often incoherent in his reply. The easy-going Protestant claimed that the doctrines assailed were obsolete, as his church had, at least implicitly, changed them. "Then change your church," said Father Hecker; "if you have come back to the right doctrine, why not come back to the true Church?" As to the average intelligent inquirer, he was uniformly influenced by these lectures against the Reformation and its entire teaching, with its dreadful effects of doubt and division among Christians.
Father Hecker had an intuitive perception of the peculiar difficulties of the American people, and ever showed the utmost readiness and skill in meeting them. He had a matchless power of laying bare the wants of the human heart, and an equal facility of pointing out the light and strength of Catholicity for their supply. His immense sympathy for an aspiring and guileless soul deprived of the truth, was most evident; he always looked it and spoke it and acted it before his audience. To do so was no effort on his part. He told of the promised land not as a native of it, but as a messenger sent into it, and now returned with such tidings as should hasten the steps of his brethren still wandering in the desert; and this sympathetic interest embraced the civil as well as the religious side of human nature. He claimed everything really American for the Catholic faith, and this was joy and gladness to many a weary heart drawn to the Church by her charities, or her beautiful symbolism, yet hindered by the phantom of absolute authority and the dread of losing the integrity of free citizenship. Incivism—will Catholic apologists never learn it?—is the heaviest stone flung at the Church in all free lands to-day. Father Hecker's blood fairly boiled that the Church of Christ, the very home of Christian freedom, and the nursing-mother of all civil well-being, should be thus assailed, while Calvin's and Luther's degrading doctrines should be paraded as alone worthy of a free people.
To say that Father Hecker "Americanized" in the narrow sense would be to do him injustice. The American ideas to which he appealed he knew to be God's will for all civilized peoples of our time. If fundamentally American they were not for that reason exclusively American. His Americanism is so broad that by a change of place it can be made Spanish, or German; and a slight change of terms makes it religious and Catholic. Nor had form of government essentially to do with it; human equality cannot be monopolized by republics; it can be rightly understood in a monarchy, though in such a ease it does not assume the conspicuous place which it does in a republic. It was this broadness of Father Hecker's Americanism that made him acceptable to the extremely conservative circles of Rome, in his struggle there in the winter of 1858-9. Many men in the monarchies of the old World may doubt the advent of republicanism there, but what sensible man anywhere doubts the aspiration of all races towards liberty and intelligence?
Father Hecker's repertory covered the entire ground between
scepticism and Catholicism. In refutation of Protestantism the
principal lectures were: The Church and the Republic; Luther and the
Reformation; How and Why I Became a Catholic, or A Search after
Rational Christianity; and The State of Religion in the United
States. On the positive side his chief topics were: The Church as a
Society, Why We Invoke the Saints, and the Sacraments of Penance and
Holy Communion. Others he had against materialism, spiritualism, etc.
As may naturally be supposed, some of his lectures succeeded better than others. One of those he personally preferred was The Churrk and the Republic. He opened by affirming, as the fundamental principle of the American nation, that man is naturally virtuous enough to be capable of self-government. He developed this in various ways till his audience felt that it was to be the touchstone of the question between the churches. He then exhibited the Protestant teaching on human virtue and human depravity, quoting extensively from Luther and from Calvin, as well as from the creeds of the principal Protestant sects, until the contrast between their teaching and the fundamental American principle was painfully vivid. There was no escape; doctrinal Protestantism is un-American. He then gave the Catholic doctrine of free will, of merit, of human dignity, and of the equality of men and human brotherhood. The impression was profound. Great mountains of prejudice were lifted up and cast into the sea. The elevating influences of the Church's faith fixed men's eyes and won their hearts. To have it demonstrated that Catholicity was not a gigantic effort to combine all available human forces to maintain a central religious despotism in the hands of a hierarchy, was a surprise to multitudes of Protestants. To not a few intelligent Catholics the style of argument was a great novelty. Father Hecker's success proved that the claim of authority on the part of the Church could be established without much difficulty in men's minds, if it were not associated with the enslavement of reason and conscience, and if shown to be consistent with rational liberty. He insisted upon the positive view of the subject. He proclaimed the purpose of Catholic discipline to be essentially conservative of human rights, a divinely-appointed safeguard to the liberty and enlightenment of the soul of man. He further proclaimed that the infliction of penalties by Church authority was an accidental exercise of power provoked by disobedience to lawful authority.
Luther and the Reformation excited widespread remark, and yet to one accustomed to old-time controversy it seemed but a fragment of an argument. The lecture proved that Luther was not an honest reformer, because, having started to reform inside the Church and as a Catholic, he finished by leaving the Church and therefore the real work of reform. At the outset Father Hecker proved that Luther was but one, and by no means the most important one, of the great body of Catholic reformers of his time. These set to work to remedy abuses which had grown to such an extent as to have become intolerable. The genuine reformers, led by the Popes, went right on and did reform the Church most thoroughly, ending by the decrees of the Council of Trent. All this the lecturer proved by citations from numerous high authorities, all of them Protestants. Why did Luther leave the company of the true reformers? or, as Father Hecker puts it, "Why did Luther change his base?" Whatever reason he had for leaving Catholicity, it was not, as a matter of fact, on account of zeal for reform. The lecture concluded by emphatically and, in different terms, repeatedly denying to Luther the name of Reformer and to his work the name of Reformation. Such was the line of argument in a lecture which entertained the general public and enraged bigoted Protestants more, perhaps, than any of the others. The secret of its success was that it overturned the great Protestant idol.
With humanitarians, rationalists, indifferentists, and sceptics Father Hecker's lectures were popular, and such were his favorite audience. If he so much as aroused their curiosity about the Church, he deemed that he had gained a victory; this and more than this he always succeeded in doing. Regular "church members" he did not hope much from, though they came to hear him and he sometimes made converts even among them. The lecture system, then far more in vogue than at present, gave him hearers from all classes of minds, and especially those most intellectually restless and inquiring. He took his turn in the list which contained the names of Wendell Phillips, Beecher, Emerson, and Sumner, and found his golden opportunity before such audiences as had been gathered to listen to them. Thus into the drifts of thought and into the intellectual movements around him, into the daily and periodical press, into the social and political and scientific groupings of men and women, his lectures enabled him to breathe the peremptory call of the true religion, sure to provoke inquiry in all active minds, and in some to find good soil and bear the harvest of conversion. He searched for earnest souls; and his confidence that they were everywhere to be found was rewarded not only in many particular instances, but also by the removal of much prejudice throughout the entire country.
The writer of these pages saw Father Hecker for the first time on the lecture platform. He was then in the full tide of success, conscious of his opportunity and of his power to profit by it. We never can forget how distinctly American was the impression of his personality. We had heard the nation's greatest men then living, and their type was too familiar to be successfully counterfeited. Father Hecker was so plainly a great man of that type, so evidently an outgrowth of our institutions, that he stamped American on every Catholic argument he proposed. Nor was the force of this peculiar impression lessened by the whispered grumblings of a few petty minds among Catholics themselves, to whom this apostolic trait was cause for suspicion. Never was a man more Catholic than Father Hecker, simply, calmly, joyfully, entirely Catholic. What better proof of this than the rage into which his lectures and writings threw the outright enemies of the Church? Grave ministers lost their balance and foamed at him as a trickster and a hypocrite, all the worse because double-dyed with pretence of love of country.