McMaster insisted on visiting Newman at Littlemore, and afterwards gave a glowing account of his visit. He had been received by the great man, who did not enter the Church till a few months later, with the utmost kindness. He found him standing in his library, reading a book. He asked many questions about the tendency of men's minds in America, and was especially interested in Arthur Carey, with whose influence among American Episcopalians and early death the reader has been made acquainted. They lodged at a decent little inn over a pastry cook's shop and did not go sight-seeing to any extent. McMaster's companions did not wait for his return from Oxford, but when the packet sailed for Antwerp, which was Sunday, the 30th of August, they went down to Folkestone and took passage. They arrived the following morning, and, armed with a letter from Father Rumpler to a Madame Marchand, a warm friend of the congregation, they went straight to the nearest Church to inquire the way to her house. It happened to be the Jesuit church, and one of the fathers kindly guided them to the lady's house. She was delighted to serve them; gave them an excellent dinner, and, after they had visited Rubens' great picture, the Descent from the Cross, set them forth on their journey; but the "yea, yea and nay, nay" of Scripture, or rather jah, jah, nein, nein, was their only conversation with the good lady, for although young Walworth could speak French and Isaac German, she knew nothing but Flemish. Distances are not great in little Belgium, and so before night they were at St. Trond, a little city about thirty-five miles southeast of Antwerp and twenty miles from Liège. Here they were soon joined by Mr. McMaster, and their novitiate began. Isaac Hecker was now twenty-five years and nine months old.
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CHAPTER XXI
BROTHER HECKER
THE Redemptorist novitiate at St. Trond, as well as the house of studies at Wittem, Holland, had been established be the immediate disciples of St. Clement Hofbauer. That great servant of God had introduced the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer into Austria and other parts of Germany several years before the time of which we write. A saint himself, and of wonderful missionary gifts, he was worthy of the title of second founder of the order of St. Alphonsus Liguori. St. Clement was the son of a Moravian peasant, and in early life had been a baker by trade. St. Alphonsus was still alive when Clement, while on a pilgrimage to Rome, was enrolled there in the Redemptorist novitiate. This event was auspicious of the future of the entire community, since his apostolate was the means of propagating the order among the northern nations, and giving to it some of its present dominant characteristics of Teutonic discipline; whereas in the land of its origin it has never fully recovered from the disasters which befell it during the lifetime of its founder. In Germany and the Low Countries, on the other hand, the children of St. Alphonsus and St. Clement were, at the time when the three Americans joined them, the most powerful preachers in the Church. Their vocation called them to give missions—spiritual exercises lasting from a week to a month—to the faithful in every part of Catholic Europe, not excepting France. Their fame was established as the foremost preachers of penance and of the Redeemer's love for sinners.
St. Trond was the novitiate of the Belgian Province, which embraced Belgium and Holland as well as the newly established convents in England and America. The Provincial was Father de Held, whom we saw in Baltimore while he was there on a tour of inspection of the American houses. He was an Austrian German, a man of noble presence, matured spirituality and an accomplished missionary. Father Hecker knew him well in after years, and always counted him as one who understood his spirit and approved his aspirations.
The convent in St. Trond was in a narrow street of the quaint little city; so narrow, indeed, that one almost fancied that he could touch both walls by stretching out his arms. It was a solid old structure, built in the first half of the fifteenth century by St. Colette for her Poor Clares, an ample guarantee of its conformity to the ideas of religious poverty. It was not architecturally fine, but was a curious and interesting building. Isaac in one of his letters home says that the house was very roomy, with long corridors having cells on each side. It abutted on a church which was open to the public and served by the fathers; a window in the convent chapel looked into the sanctuary. Attached to the house was a garden of three or four acres.
The country around the town is a typical Flemish landscape, flat, fertile, thickly dotted with farm buildings, and highly cultivated. The people are wholly Catholic. The town is an old one, and in its time has had some military importance. Our young novices often walked upon the ramparts which encircled it. In the neighborhood are structures which were built before the Christian era; quite near by was one of Cæsar's round towers, as well as the deserted ruins of an ancient city named Leo. Curious old churches and monasteries might often be seen by the novices on their long walks into the country. All this antiquity was the more pleasing to the American novices because in their own land the forests, the rivers, and the everlasting hills are all that represent the distant past.
Besides twenty novices there were ten or twelve fathers at St. Trond, who either served the church or went about on missions; and there were also a number of lay brothers. By nationality the greater portion of the novices were Belgians and Hollanders, the others being mostly Germans. The language of the house was French, though Latin was sometimes used. Of course this was an added difficulty to Brother Hecker, as he was now called, for he knew practically nothing of that language, though he had studied it a little. But he attacked it resolutely and, as one of his companions said, learned it heels over head. He never feared to make mistakes, nor dreaded a smile at his expense, and as a consequence was soon able to talk to any one. But his French was always curious, and when he took his turn at reading during meals he gave the community some hearty laughs.
All the new-comers were invested with the Redemptorist habit about three weeks after their arrival, in September, 1845. "You can scarce imagine the happiness I felt on my arrival here," he writes to his mother in his first letter home. "For three days my heart was filled with joy and gladness. I was like one who had been transported to a lovelier, a purer, and a better world." He tells her that he had waited for a fortnight before writing, to learn the place, and then, after expressing his satisfaction with everything in such sentences as the above, he fills the rest of the letter with arguments in favor of the Catholic Church and exhortations to join it. Such was the burden of all of his letters home from both St. Trond and Wittem. We have ten written from the novitiate. An exception must be made as to one which describes in detail the daily order of life in the novitiate. It is addressed to his mother.