treasury new things and old," as there is demand for one kind or the
other. The apostles of nations, from Paul before the Areopagus to
Patrick upon the summit of Tara, followed no different principle.

The circumstances of Catholics have been peculiar in the United
States, and we have unavoidably suffered on this account. Catholics
in largest numbers were Europeans, and so were their priests, many of
whom--by no means all--remained in heart and mind and mode of action
as alien to America as if they had never been removed from the
Shannon, the Loire, or the Rhine. No one need remind me that
immigration has brought us inestimable blessings, or that without it
the Church in America would be of small stature. The remembrance of a
precious fact is not put aside, if I recall an accidental evil
attaching to it. Priests foreign in disposition and work were not
fitted to make favorable impressions upon the non-Catholic American
population, and the American-born children of Catholic immigrants
were likely to escape their action. And, lest I be misunderstood, I
assert all this is as true of priests coming from Ireland as from any
other foreign country. Even priests of American ancestry, ministering
to immigrants, not unfrequently fell into the lines of those around
them, and did but little to make the Church in America throb with
American life. Not so Isaac Thomas Hecker. Whether consciously or
unconsciously I do not know, and it matters not, he looked on America
as the fairest conquest for divine truth, and he girded himself with
arms shaped and tempered to the American pattern. I think that it may
be said that the American current, so plain for the last quarter of a
century in the flow of Catholic affairs, is, largely at least, to be
traced back to Father Hecker and his early co-workers. It used to be
said of them in reproach that they were the "Yankee" Catholic Church;
the reproach was their praise.