Father Othmann, in bidding him farewell at St.Trond, had told him to become _"un saint fou,"_ a holy fool; a direction based upon his excessive abstraction of mind towards mystical things, and his consequent incapacity for mental effort in ordinary affairs.

Once, at least, during those two eventful years at Wittem, Father Othmann visited the place, and when he saw Brother Hecker he embraced him and exclaimed, "O here is the spouse of the Canticles!" His farewell injunction on parting at St.Trond had been perforce complied with.
It must have taken more than ordinary penetration to perceive anything but a kind of grandiose folly in Brother Hecker.

The impulse to talk about the conversion of America, to plan it and advocate it, to proclaim it possible and prove it so, and to philosophize on the profoundest questions of the human reason, was irrepressible.

This he did with an air of matured conviction and with the impact of conscious moral authority, but in terms as strikingly eccentric as the thoughts were lofty and inspiring, and in execrable French, the declaimer being known as _minus habens_ in his studies and utterly incapable.

All this was the very make-up of folly; and Brother Hecker was no doubt thought a fool.