Life of Father Hecker

t his native town of Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia, to seek a new home in America. There is a family tradition to the effect

ater, 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 h

ttained 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

agogue 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 st

d 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

e 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 Wetz

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

welve years only, she dying at the residence of her eldest son's widow in 1876, in the full possession of faculties which must have been of no common order. From her, and through her from Engel Freund, who was what is called "a

inherited both of these traits, and there was the warmest sympathy between them. He was her youngest son, h

n the Holy Catholic Church, her noble heart accepted for him what she could not see for herself. She said to a lady who spoke to her on the subject and who could not be reconciled to th

ick room she did wonders. Family ties were kept warm, and no one whom she had loved and known was forgotten. The poor were ever welcome, and came to

tholic faith it would have found expression in the religious life, as she sometimes sa

aks of her as "a lovely and dignified character, full of 'humanities.' She was fair, tall, erect, a very superior example of the German house-mother. Hers was the controlling spirit

istianity to which Protestantism leads more or less quickly according as the logical faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparte

?" somebody once asked him

he answered. "I neve

ong have yo

forty

n't that time enough

years?" said the old man, w

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

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 a

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 pray

y 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 stapl

ublication 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,

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 s

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 he

n Fifty-ninth Street. "It interested me very much," he said afterwards. "I found out that he is one of five little

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 w

s at the time willing to express. Still, it may be questioned whether he ever had any natural aptitude for close, continuous book-work, at least on ordinary and prescribed lines. He was "always studying," indeed, as he sometimes said in speaking of his early life, but the thoughts of other men, whether written or spoken, do not seem to have been greatly valued by him, except as keys which might help him to unlock those mysteries of God and man, and their mutual relations,

f the reasons which took him to Brook Farm. In the first entry of the earliest of his diaries which has been preserved he thus speaks of h

ing on the floor, my mother said to my brother John, without anything previously being spoken on the subject, and suddenly, in a kind of unconscious speech, 'John, let Isaac go to college and study.' These words went through me like liquid fire. He made some eva

er taught him his prayers, the schoolmistress his letters, necessity his daily round of duties, and for the rest he was left very much to himself and to that interior Master of whose stress and constraint upon him he grew more intimately conscious as he grew in years. The force of this inward pressure showed itself in many ways. Outwardly it made his manner undemonstrative, and fixed an intangible yet very

the close of his life how it was that he had never used tobacco in any form, he answered: "Mother forbade it, and that was enough for George and me. I was never ruled in any way but by her affection. That was sufficient." The parallel fact that he never in his life drank a drop of liquor at a bar or at any public place was probably due to a similar injunction. The children were brought up,

wn youth pure. He had been baptized in infancy, however, as the children of orthodox Protestants more commonly were at that period than at present, and in all probability validly, so that one could never positi

bt on my mind that he had kept his baptismal innocence. He was deeply attached to an edifying and religious mother; he was at hard work before the dawn of sensual passion, and his recreation, even as a boy, was in talking and reading about deep social

pretty sure) to tell him that she was angry with him; and this so distressed him that he was utterly miserable, sat down on the floor completely overcome, and so

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