a leading fact in his life: his leaving an old-established religious community for the purpose of instituting that of the Paulists. I will speak so far of this as I have formed an estimate of it. To me, this fact seems to have been a Providential circumstance in keeping with all else in his life. I myself have at this moment such thoughts as I imagine must have been running through his mind during that memorable sojourn in Rome, which resulted in freeing him from his old allegiance. The work of evangelizing America demands new methods. It is time to draw forth from our treasury the "new things" of the Gospel; we have been long enough offering "old things." Those new methods call for newly-equipped men. The parochial clergy will readily confess that they cannot of themselves do all that God now demands from His Church in this country. They are too heavily burdened with the ordinary duties of the ministry: instructing those already within the fold, administering the sacraments, building temples, schools, and asylums—duties which must be attended to and which leave slight leisure for special studies or special labors. Father Hecker organized the Paulist community, and did in his way a great work for the conversion of the country. He made no mistake when he planned for a body of priests, more disciplined than usually are the parochial clergy, and more supple in the character of their institute than the existing religious orders.

We shall always distinguish Isaac Thomas Hecker as the ornament, the flower of our American priesthood—the type that we wish to see reproduced among us in widest proportions. Ameliorations may be sought for in details, and the more of them the better for religion; but the great lines of Father Hecker's personality we should guard with jealous love in the formation of the future priestly characters of America.

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THE LIFE OF FATHER HECKER ________________________

CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

TOWARDS the close of the eighteenth century a German clockmaker named Engel Freund, accompanied by his wife and children, left his native town of Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia, to seek a new home in America. There is a family tradition to the effect that his forefathers were French, and that they came into Germany on account of some internal commotion in their own country. The name makes it more probable that they were Alsatians who quietly moved across the Rhine, either when their province was first ceded to France, or perhaps later, at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. When Engel Freund quitted Germany the disturbing influences of the French Revolution may have had a considerable share in determining his departure. He landed at New York in 1797 and established himself in Hester Street, between Christie and Forsyth.

His wife, born Ann Elizabeth Schneider, in 1764, was a native of Frankenburg, Hesse Cassel. She became the mother of a son and several daughters, who attained maturity and settled in New York. As his girls grew into womanhood and married, Engel Freund, who was a thrifty and successful tradesman in his prime, dowered each of them with a house in his own neighborhood, seeking thus to perpetuate in the new the kindly patriarchal customs of the old land.

To the New-Yorker of to-day, or, indeed, to any reputable and industrious immigrant, the notion of settling a family in Hester Street could not seem other than grotesque. It is now the filthy and swarming centre of a very low population. The Jewish pedlar par éminence lives there and thereabouts. Signs painted in the characters of his race, not of his accidental nationality, abound on every side. Here a synagogue occupies the story above a shop; there Masonic symbols are exhibited between the windows in a similar location. Jewish faces of the least prepossessing type look askance into eyes which they recognize as both unfamiliar and observant. Women, unkempt and slouchy, or else arrayed in dubious finery, brush against one. At intervals fast growing greater the remains of an extinct domesticity and privacy still show themselves in the shape of old-fashioned brick or wooden houses with Dutch gables or Queen Anne fronts, but for the most part tall tenement-houses, their lower stories uniformly given up to some small traffic, claim exclusive right of possession. The sidewalks are crowded with the stalls of a yet more petty trade; the neighborhood is full of unpleasant sights, unwholesome odors, and revolting sounds.

But the Hester Street of seventy years ago and more was another matter. When a canal flowed through Canal Street, and tall trees growing on either side of it sheltered the solid and roomy houses of retired merchants and professional men, Hester Street was a long way up town. Seven years before the subject of the present biography was born, that elegantly proportioned structure, the City Hall, which had then been nine years a-building, was finished in material much less expensive than had been intended when it was begun. Marble was very dear, reasoned the thrifty and far-sighted City Fathers of the day, and as the population of New York were never likely to settle to any extent above Chambers Street, the rear of the hall would be seen so seldom that this economy would not be noticeable. What is now Fourteenth Street was then a place given over to market-gardens. Rutgers Street, Rutgers Place, Henry Street, were fashionable localities, and the adjacent quarter, now so malodorous and disreputable, was eminently respectable. Freund's daughters, as they left the parental roof for modest houses of his gift close by, no doubt had reason to consider themselves abundantly fortunate in their surroundings.

One of these daughters, Caroline Sophia Susanna Henrietta Wilhelmina, born in Elberfeld on the 2d of March, 1796, was still a babe in arms at the time of the family emigration. She was a tall, fair, handsome girl, not long past her fifteenth birthday when she became a wife. Her husband, John Hecker, was nearly twice her age, having been born in Wetzlar, Prussia, May 7, 1782. He was the son of another John Hecker, a brewer by trade, who married the daughter of a Colonel Schmidt. Both parents were natives of Wetzlar. Their son learned the business of a machinist and brass-founder, and emigrated to America in 1800. He was married to Caroline Freund in the Old Dutch Church in the Swamp, July 21, 1811. He died in New York, in the house of his eldest son, July 10, 1860.

Events proved John Hecker to have been equally fortunate and sagacious in his choice of a wife. At the time of their marriage he was thrifty and well-to-do. At one period he owned a flourishing brass-foundry in Hester Street, and during his early married life his prosperity was uninterrupted. But before many years had passed his business declined, and from one cause and another he never succeeded in re-establishing it. This misfortune, occurring while even the eldest of the sons was still a lad, might easily have proved irreparable in more senses than one. But the very fact that the ordinary gates to learning were so soon closed against these children caused the natural tendency they had toward knowledge to impel them all the more strongly in that shorter road to practical wisdom which leads through labor and experience. The Hecker brothers were all hard at work while still mere children, and before John, the eldest, had attained to legal manhood, they had fixed the solid foundations of an enduring prosperity, and all need of further exertion on the part of their parents was over for ever.

Isaac Thomas Hecker, the third son and youngest child of this couple, was born in New York at a house in Christie Street, between Grand and Hester, December 18, 1819, when his mother was not yet twenty-four. He survived her by twelve years only, she dying at the residence of her eldest son's widow in