He was not unwilling to trace his breaking down to excessive austerity in former years. Once when asked for advice about corporal mortification he answered: "Don't go too fast. Remember St. Bernard's regret for having gone too far with such things in his youth. For my part, for many years I practised frightful penances, and now I fear that much of my physical helplessness is due to that cause." His state was not one of utter debility, though that quickly resulted if watchfulness were relaxed, or from application to responsible duties. But his strength never was to much to speak of, "only so, so," to use his own expressions, which signified a very small amount of the power of exertion or endurance in the muscles and nerves.
"What about my health?" he wrote from Europe. "There are days when I feel quite myself, and then others when I sink down to the bottom. My condition of mind and body often perplexes me, and there is nothing left me but to abandon all into the hands of Divine Providence. The end of it all is entirely in the dark, and were there not parallel epochs in my past life, and similar things in the lives of some others which I have read, my perplexity would be greater."
And again, from Ragatz, in the summer of 1875:
"My state of health is much the same. I found last week that my pulse was bounding in a few hours from the sixties into the nineties without any apparent cause. Yesterday I determined to consult the leading physician here. He examined me, and, like all others, attributes everything to my nerves, resulting from impoverished blood. I say to myself: 1st, How long will the machine keep working in this style? 2d, There will be a smash-up some day. 3d, Or perhaps I shall be able to get up more steam and run it a while longer. Who knows?"
And in another letter from the same place:
"Even here, freed from all [labors], it often seems to me that a good breeze, if it struck me in the right place, would drive the soul out of my body, so lightly is it connected with it, so slightly do they hold together."
As already said, his trip to Egypt had given him a temporary relief, and this was due, so he supposed, to utter change of scene and to solitude. When it was over he wrote as follows:
"This trip has been in every respect much more to my benefit than my most sanguine expectations led me to hope. It seems to me almost like an inspiration, such have been its beneficial effects to my mind and body. In Nubia there reigned profound silence and repose, and in lower Egypt, although there is more activity and evidence of modern life, still it is quiet and tranquil. I feel somewhat like one who has been in solitude for three or four months."
"My daily régime," he writes to his brother and Mrs. Hecker, from Italy, "has not changed these two years which I have spent in Europe. If I rise before nine I feel it the whole day. In the morning I awake about seven for good, and take a cup of tea with some bread and butter. I then read; sometimes, not often, I write a note in bed, and rise about nine or ten. I take a lunch at twelve and dine at six. My appetite is not much at any time. My sleep, so so. [All through his illness he went to bed at nine or shortly after.] I feel for the most part like a man balancing whether he will keep on swimming or go under the water. Sometimes I take a nap two or three times a day—if I can get it. There are weeks when I do not and cannot put my pen to paper. To write a note is a great effort. . . . Though my strength is so little my mind is not unoccupied, and I keep up some reading."
Just in what way his spiritual difficulties accelerated his bodily decline it is hard to say, for he was generally extremely reticent as to his interior life. A few words dropped unawares and at long intervals, and carefully taken down at the time, give fleeting glimpses into a soul which was a dark chamber of sorrow, though it was sometimes peaceful sorrow. To this we can fortunately add some sentences written in an unusually confidential mood in letters from Europe. Before his illness he was over-joyful, or so it seemed to some to whom this trait of his was a temptation. "Why," it was said, "religion seems to have no penitential side to Father Hecker at all." From the day of his ordination until his illness began he might have made the Psalmist's words his own: "There be many that say, Who shall show us any good? Lord, Thou hast set upon us the light of Thy countenance, Thou hast put gladness in my heart." But now the light of that radiant joy had faded away, and the face of God, though as present as ever before, loomed over him dark, threatening, and majestic. He had studied spiritual doctrine too well not to be ready for this trial, nor had it been sent to him without warning. Nevertheless the sensible presence of God's love had been so vivid and constant that he could alternate the joy of labor with that of prayer with the greatest ease. And now it was an alternation, not of choice but of dire compulsion, between bitter, helpless inaction, and a state of prayer which was a mere dread of an all-too-near Judge. It seemed to him as if he had boasted, "I said in my abundance I shall not be moved for ever," and now he must end the inspired sentence, "Thou hast turned away Thy face from me and I became troubled." When this obscuration of the Divine Love first grew upon him the misery of it was intolerable and was borne with extreme difficulty. The pain was lessened at intervals as time passed on, and before a year had elapsed, his letters from Europe, though they did not before complain of desolation, now show its previous existence by hailing the advent of seasons of interior peace. But from beginning to end of this entire period of his life we have not found a word of his speaking of joy. And again, even the peace would go and the desolation return; the face of God, not any time smiling, had lost its calm regard and was once more bent frowning upon him. The following extracts from letters written from Switzerland in the autumn of 1874, and within a month of each other, tell of these alternations of storm and calm: