What he wrote to a friend suffering from illness he applied to himself; he made spiritual profit, as best he might, from separation from the men and the vocation he loved so well:
"I can sympathize with you more completely in your sickness being myself not well. To be shut off from the world, and cut off from human activity—and this is what it means to be sick—gives the soul the best conditions to love God alone, and this is Paradise upon earth. Blessed sickness! which detaches the soul from all creatures and unites it to its sovereign Good. But one's duties and responsibilities, what of these in the meantime? We must give them all up one day, and why not now? We think ourselves necessary, and others try to make us believe the same; there is but little truth and much self-love in this. 'What else do I require of thee,' says our Lord in Thomas à Kempis, 'than that thou shouldst resign thyself integrally to Me.' This is what our Lord is fighting for in our souls."
Yet in having his life-work torn away from him he was like a man whose leg has been crushed and then amputated, the phantom of the lost limb aching in every muscle, bone, and nerve. This was partly the secret of his pain while in Europe, at the mere thought of his former active life; it haunted him with memories of its lost opportunities, its shortcomings in motive or achievement, or what he fancied to be such, in view of the Divine justice, now always reckoning with him.
He was ever cheerful in word, even when the pallor of his face and the blazing of his eyes betrayed his bodily and spiritual pain. "The end of religion is joy, joy here no less than joy hereafter," he once insisted, and he argued long and energetically for the proposition; but meantime he was racked with inner agony and was too feeble to walk alone. In his letters and diaries he speaks of his illness and of its symptoms as of those of another person of whom he was giving news.
His wanderings in Europe were like gropings after the Divine will in the midst of the spirit's night, often in anguish, often in tranquillity, never in his former bounding joy, always with submission, beforehand, at the moment, and afterwards. Although the Divine Will gave a cold welcome, he sought no other refuge.
"There are a thousand things," he writes, "that would worry me if I would only let them, but with God's help I keep them on at arm's length. His grace suffices, or in His presence all the things of this world disappear. God alone has been always the whole desire of my heart, and what else can I wish than that His will may be wholly fulfilled in me. Having rooted everything else out of my heart, and cut me off from all things, what other desire can I have than that He who has begun the work should finish it according to His design. It is not important that I should know what that design is; it is enough that I am in His hands, to do with me whatever He pleases. To be and to live in His presence is all."
And again:
"The mind quiet both as to the past and the future, contented with the present moment: as to the past, leaving it out of sight; as to the future, unsolicitous. As to the present, satisfied to be outwardly homeless, cut on from all past friendships and relations. The present gives me all the conditions required for preparation for the future. Any time these two years past I would have made an entire renunciation of all relations to my past labors and position, but waited as a dictate of prudence. Now I feel ready to make it with calmness and in view of all its consequences."
"No sooner do I set my mind to pray than God fills it with Himself," Father Hecker was once heard to say. And this power of prayer by no means left him after 1872; only that the God who filled him was no longer revealed as the Supreme Love, but as the Supreme Majesty. "There was once a priest," he said, speaking of himself, "who had been very active for God, until at last God gave him a knowledge of the Divine Majesty. After seeing the Majesty of God that priest felt very strange and was much humbled, and knew how little a thing he was in comparison with God." Comparison with God! It was this that gave him, as it did Job, a terror of the Divine justice beyond words to express, and impressed that air of spiritual dejection upon him which struck his old friends as so strongly in contrast with his former happy and vivacious manners. "You will never know," he once said, while being helped into bed after a very sad day, "how much I have suffered till you are in heaven." Meantime this awful Deity, so prompt to enter Father Hecker's mind, coming at times like a withering blast from the desert, was still the only attraction of his soul, the only object of his love. He could no more keep his mind off God now than he could before, and now God killed him, and then He made him alive. The ideas of the Divine goodness, patience, mercy, and love which formerly welled up in abundant floods at the thought of God, at the same thought now were dried up and disappeared. "Oh!" he once exclaimed, "if I could only be sure that I shall not be damned!" This was said unawares while listening to the life of a saint. The reader will, therefore, understand that Father Hecker's inner trouble was not a state of mere aridity, a difficulty of concentration of mind on spiritual things, or a vagrancy of thought; it was a perpetual facing of his Divine Accuser and Judge, a trembling woe at the sight of Infinite Majesty on the part of one for whom the Divine love was the one necessary of life for soul and body. Yet he knew that this was really a higher form of prayer than any he had yet enjoyed, that it steadily purified his understanding by compelling ceaselessly repeated acts of faith in God's love, purified his will by constant resignation of every joy except God alone—God received by any mode in which it might please the Divine Majesty to reveal Himself. He was, therefore, willing, nay, in a true sense, glad thus to walk by mere faith and live by painful love. "I should deem it a misfortune if God should cure me of my infirmities and restore me to active usefulness, so much have I learned to appreciate the value of my passive condition of soul." This he said less than three years before his death. And about the same time, to a very intimate friend: "God revealed to me in my novitiate that at some future time I should suffer the crucifixion. I have always longed for it; but oh, now that it has come it is hard, oh, it is terrible!" And this he said weeping.
One aspect of the Divine Majesty which threatened for years to overpower him was the Last Judgment. "God has given me to see the terrors of the day of judgment," he once said, "and it has tried me with dreadful severity; but it is a wonderfully great privilege." Humility grew upon him day by day. No one who knew him well in his day of greatest power could think him a proud man, but his confidence in his vocation, and in himself is God's representative, had been immense. The following, from a memorandum, shows how he ended: