Life of Father Hecker

by Walter Elliott

"What can one learn in forty years?" said the old man, with an unanswerable twinkle.

Between him and the youngest of his Hecker grandchildren there existed a singular sympathy and affection. The two were very much together, and the little fellow was allowed to potter about the workshop and encouraged to study the ins and outs of all that went on there, as well as entertained with kindly talk that may at first have been a trifle above his years. But he was a precocious child, shrewd, observant, and thoughtful. It was in the old watchmaker's shop that the boy, not yet a dozen years old, and already hard at work helping to earn his own living, conceived the plan of making a clock with his own hands and presenting it to the church attended by the family, which was situated in Forsyth Street between Walker and Hester. The clock was finished in due time and set up in the church, where it ticked faithfully until the edifice was torn down, some forty years later. Then it was returned to its maker in accordance with a promise made by the pastor when the gift was accepted. In 1872 the opening number of the third volume of The Young Catholic contained a good engraving of it, accompanied by a sketch descriptive of its career. Although Father Hecker did not write the little story, it is so true both to fact and to sentiment that we make an extract from it. The clock hung in the Paulist sacristy for about ten years. Then, for some reason, it was taken to the country house of Mr. George Hecker, where it was accidentally destroyed by fire:

"There were points of resemblance in my own and my boy maker's nature. In him, regularity, order, and obedience were fixed principles; and with us both, Time represented Eternity. As the days of his young manhood came his pursuits and tastes in life changed. Deep thought took possession of his mind, and with it a tender love for souls and a heart-hungriness for a further knowledge of what man was given a soul for, and the way in which he was to save it. As these thoughts were maturing in his mind I often noticed his troubled look. One Sunday in particular, he lingered behind the congregation and stood before me, with a new expression in his keen gray eye; and amid the silence of the deserted aisles he thus apostrophized me: 'Farewell, old friend! fashioned by these hands, thou representest Truth, the eternal. What man is ever seeking, through me thou hast found. Here I stand, not man's but God's noblest work, as yet not having repaid my Maker with one act of duty or of service. Thou hast faithfully performed thy mission; henceforth I labor to perform mine.' With a grave and sad look my boy maker, now a young man, left me. I felt then that we had looked our last upon each other in this place; but little did either of us dream of where, when, and how we would meet again. For thirty-five years I labored on unchanged, though I must own to having had some ailments now and then. About this period of my existence I overheard straggling remarks, as the worshippers passed out of the church, which led me to conclude that some change was contemplated, and my suspicions were confirmed by the rector proposing from the pulpit the erection of a new church edifice in another part of the city, to be fashioned after a more modern style of architecture. . . . In accordance with the promise made my boy maker, I was to go back to him. My heart bounded at the prospect. Never in all those years had I seen him. . . .

"In a short time I learned that the author of my existence, after many hard struggles and trials, had at last found truth and light, peace and rest, in the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church. He had returned, when he found me, from the Plenary Council of 1867. He is now a priest, and the head of a religious community. Need I assure those who have been interested in my history that I also have found a home in the same community, where I am consecrated to its use? I am no longer alone now; I am busy from morning until night, helping to regulate the movements of the community. There is not an hour in the day when I do not see my boy maker. We have established sympathies in common; I call him to prayers, to his meals, to his matins, and to his rest. Many a time, when he finds me alone, he gives me some spiritual reading, or says aloud some prayers. Every time I strike, he breathes an aspiration of love and thanksgiving. In short, we have found our glorious mission in our new birth. We are both apostles: I represent Time; he preaches of Eternity."

There can be little doubt, however, that the chief formative influence in the Hecker household was that which came directly through the mother. Young as she was when an unduly heavy share of the domestic burdens fell to her portion, she took it up with courage and bore it with dignity and fidelity. What aid her father could give her was doubtless not lacking, but we may well suppose that, as age crept on Engel Freund, his business began to slip away from him into younger hands. He was probably no longer in a position to endow daughters or to undertake the education of grandchildren. What is certain is that Caroline Hecker's boys, after very brief school-days, were put at once to hard work. What decided their choice of an occupation is not so sure, but in all probability they consulted with their mother and then took the common-sense view that as there is a never-failing market for food staples, even poverty, if mated with diligence and sagacity, may find there a fair field for successful enterprise. John, the eldest, upon whom the mother soon began to rely as her right hand, went to learn his trade as a baker with a Mr. Schwab, whose shop was on the corner of Hester and Eldridge Streets. George, who was some three or four years younger, as the only girl, Elizabeth, came between them, presently followed his brother to the same business.

As for Isaac, whom hard necessity, or, more probably, a mistaken thrift, likewise forced away from school when not much more than ten years old, his earliest ventures bear a curious symbolic likeness to his latest. He earned his first wages in the service of a religious periodical, the Methodist publication still known as Zion's Herald, whose office was situated in Crosby Street near Broadway. From there he went to learn a trade in the type foundry in Great Thames Street. But as it was already apparent that the family road to prosperity was identical with that chosen by his elder brothers, we find him working away beside them in the bake-house by the time he was eleven. They had already established the bakery in Rutgers Street, between Monroe and Cherry, where the family lived for so many years. They had another shop in Pearl Street, to which Isaac used to carry bread every morning.

This was a part of his life to which he was fond of recurring in his last years. "Thanks be to God!" he said on the first day of 1886, "how hard we used to work preparing for New Year's Day! Three weeks in advance we began to bake New Year's cakes—flour, water, sugar, butter, and caraway seeds. We never could make enough. How I used to work carrying the bread around in my baker's cart! How often I got stuck in the gutters and in the snow! Sometimes some good soul, seeing me unable to get along, would give me a lift. I began to work when I was ten and a half years old, and I have been at it ever since."

And again, a few days later, as a poor woman carrying a heavy basket passed him in the street, he said to the companion of his walk: "I have had the blood spurt out of my arm carrying bread when I was a baker. A lady asked me once for a hundred dollars to help her send her only son to college. I answered her that my mother had four children and got along without begging, and that I would not exchange one year of those I spent working for several at college."

Less than a month before his death he fell into conversation with a newsboy on the corner near the Paulist church in Fifty-ninth Street. "It interested me very much," he said afterwards. "I found out that he is one of five little brothers, and their mother is a widow. She is trying to bring them up, poor thing! It reminds me of my own mother."

It is plain that there could not have been much room for formal study in a life of hard physical labor, so soon begun and so unremittingly continued during the years usually given up to school work. An ordinary boy, placed in such circumstances, would doubtless have grown up ignorant and unformed. But while none of the Hecker boys was quite of the ordinary stamp, Isaac was distinctly sui generis and individual. He has said of himself that he could remember no period of his life when he had not the consciousness of having been sent into the world for some especial purpose. What it was he knew not, but expectation and desire for the withheld knowledge kept him pondering and self-withdrawn. Once in his childhood he was given over for death with a bad attack of confluent small-pox, and his mother came to his bedside to tell him so. "No, mother," he answered her, "I shall not die now. God has a work for me to do in the world, and I shall live to do it."