"I told him how courageous I felt. Answer: That is the way I used to feel. I used to say, O Lord! I feel as if I had the whole world on my shoulders; and all I've got to say is, O Lord! I am sorry you've given me such small potatoes to carry on my back. But now—well, when a mosquito comes in I say, Mosquito, have you any good to do me? Yes? Then I thank you, for I am glad to get good from a mosquito."
It will thus be seen that whatever diseases may have enfeebled Father Hecker's body, his spirit suffered from a malady known only to great souls—thirst for God. This gave him rest neither day nor night, or allowed him intervals of peace only to return with renewed force. Some men love gold too much for their peace of mind, some love women too much, and some power; men like Father Hecker love the Infinite Good too much to be happy in soul or sound in body unless He be revealed to them as a loving father. And this knowledge of God once possessed and lost again, although it breeds a purer, a more perfectly disinterested love, leaves both soul and body in a state of acute distress. "My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee, in a dry and desert land without water."
Tried by these visitations, he was free to acknowledge that in past times he had been favored above others:
"Oh! there was a time," he said, "when I was borne along high above nature by the grace of God, and I feared that I should die without being subject to nature, and should never feel the need of the supernatural. But for many years now I have been left by God to my natural weakness and get nothing whatever except what I earn."
The following words of his indicate the cleansing process of these divine influences; it is from memoranda:
"He said to me once, after he had been for nine or ten years subject to almost unceasing desolation of spirit, 'all this suffering, though it has been excruciating, has greatly purified me and was of the last necessity to me. Oh, how proud I was! how vain I was! And these long years of abandonment by God have healed me.' I think this was the only time I ever knew him to connect his sufferings with fault. What he said may have referred to the mere temper and frame of his mind rather than to particular, specific faults. He undoubtedly thought more highly of human nature before that desolation began than he did at the end of it."
Meantime he used every aid for the assuagement of his interior sufferings, just as he conscientiously tried every means for the restoration of his bodily health. Good books helped him greatly. He recited his Breviary as he would read a new and interesting book, underlining here and there, and noting on the margins. But during most of his time of illness his infirmities made the Divine Office impossible. Every day he read or had read to him some parts of the Scriptures in English. "Without the Book of Job," he used to say, "I would have broken down completely." Lallemant, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Genoa, and other authors of a mystical tendency he frequently used. But next to the Scriptures no book served him so well during his illness as Abandonment, or Entire Surrender to Divine Providence, a small posthumous treatise of Father P. J. Caussade, S.J., edited and published by Father H. Ramière, S.J., with a strong defence of the author's doctrine by way of preface. At Father Hecker's suggestion it we translated into English by Miss Ella McMahon, and has already soothed many hearts in difficulties of every kind. It is an ingenious compendium of all spiritual wisdom, but it seemed to Father Hecker that submission to the Divine Will is taught in its pages as it has never been done since the time of the Apostles. The little French copy which he used is thumbed all to pieces. He used it incessantly when in great trouble of mind and knew it almost by heart. As he read its sentences or heard them read he would ejaculate, "Ah, how sweet that is!" "Oh, what a great truth!" "Oh, that is a most consoling doctrine!" just as a man exhausted with thirst and covered with dust, as he drinks and bathes at a gushing fountain in the desert, calls out and sighs and smiles.
Did he not find men here and there in his travels with whom he would take counsel and who could comfort him? There is little trace of it, though he never lacked sympathetic friends for his bodily ailments. In truth he tried to maintain a cheerful exterior, though occasionally he failed in his attempts to do so. Only once do we find by his letters and diaries that he opened his mind freely on his interior difficulties while in Europe, and that was to Cardinal Deschamps, who gave him, he writes, very great comfort.
No part of his sojourn in the Old World pleased and profited him so much as his trip up the Nile in the winter of 1873-4.
"In information of most various kinds," he writes, "it has been the richest four months of my whole life. The value intellectually and religiously as well as physically is incalculable. Given but one trip, it would puzzle me to name any which can compare with that up the Nile to Wady-Halfa. Nubia must be included. It has something of its own which you can find neither in Egypt nor elsewhere: silence, repose, almost total solitude, and its own peculiar people."