I embrace you, dear brother, in the love of our crucified Lord." "DEAR MOTHER: There have been times when, considering the wickedness of the world, sensible of its miseries and my own, and at the same time beholding obscurely and as it were tasting the things of heaven, I have longed and wished to be separated from the body.

But when coming back to myself, and thinking that with the aid of grace I can still increase in God's love and hence love Him still more in consequence for all eternity, I feel willing to love and suffer until the last day, if by this I should acquire but one drop more of Divine love in my heart.

And so it is, as St.Paul declares, that we should count the trials here as nothing compared with the glory that awaits us.

Now, all these considerations, dear mother, join together to increase my desire to see you in the communion of the Holy Catholic Church, to which God has singularly given so many means of growing in grace," etc., etc.
Notwithstanding these marks of active intelligence, Brother Hecker could not study, except by fits and starts.

Often he could not get through the common prayers, and in ordinary conversation his tongue would sometimes be tangled among the words of a sentence before he was half through with it.