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 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 character," Father
Hecker seems to have derived many of his life-long peculiarities. "I
never knew a son so like his mother," writes to us one who had an
intimate acquaintance with both of them for more than forty years.
She adds:

"Mrs. Hecker was a woman of great energy of character and strong
religious nature. Her son, Father Hecker, inherited both of these
traits, and there was the warmest sympathy between them. He was her
youngest son, her baby, she called him, but with all her tender love
she had a holy veneration for his character as priest.

"She deeply sympathized with him through the trials and anxieties
that were his in his search after truth, and when his heart found
rest, and the aspirations of his soul were answered in the Holy