To the good sense, good temper, and strong religious nature of
Caroline Hecker her children owed, and always cordially acknowledged,
a heavy, and in one respect an almost undivided, debt of gratitude.
Neither Engel Freund nor John Hecker professed any religious faith.
The latter was never in the habit of attending any place of worship.
Both were Lutheran so far as their antecedents could make them so,
but neither seems to have practically known much beyond the flat
negation, or at best the simple disregard, of Christianity 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 imparted to him. He was a kindly, virtuous,
warm-hearted man, with a life of his own which made him incurious and
thoughtful, and singularly devoid of prejudices. When his daughter
Caroline elected to desert the Reformed Dutch Church in which the
family had a pew, and to attach herself to another sect, he had only
a jocular word of surprise to say concerning her odd fancy for "those
noisy Methodists." He had a true German fondness for old ways and
settled customs, and to the end of his days spoke only his own
vernacular.

"Why don't you talk English?" somebody once asked him toward the
close of his life.

"I don't know how," he answered. "I never had time to learn."