"Pere Othmann, my novice-master," said Father Hecker, in after years, "had a right to be puzzled by me, and so he watched me more than he did the others." He watched and studied him and gradually applied the two sovereign tests of genuine spirituality, obedience and humiliation.
These were all the more efficacious in this case, because Brother Hecker was a man of great native independence of character and naturally of an extremely sensitive disposition.
Such was the common austerity of the life that it took some ingenuity to inflict on a novice a mortification which had not grown stale by use in the case of one or more of the others.

But in searching the interior of the soul the director could find tender places into which his weapon would be plunged to the bone.

But it is more than probable that he misunderstood Brother Hecker, and that for a time he even suspected him of being under delusions.

For several months, at any rate, he treated him at his weekly confession with the utmost rigor, producing indescribable mental agony.

Many years afterwards, and when near his death, Father Hecker once said to the writer: "While I was kneeling among the novices, outside Pere Othmann's room, waiting to go to confession, I often begged of God that it might be His will that I should die before my turn came, so dreadful an ordeal had confession become on account of the severity of the novice-master." Yet, as recorded in the memoranda, the victim was eager for the sacrifice when the knife was not actually lifted over him.