He thought the sermon a good one as a beginning, but it seems to have given him no encouragement, and we venture to think that if it profited his hearers somewhat it also amused them a little.

He needed a teacher, and he found one in Father Bernard, the newly appointed provincial of the American province.
In 1850 Father Bernard Joseph Hafkenscheid* was made Provincial of the Redemptorist houses in America.

His patronymic was too formidable for ordinary use, and he was universally known as Father Bernard.

He was in the prime of life on taking this office, and although he had spent twenty years on the missions in Holland, his native country, in Belgium and England, he yet showed no signs of these labors; he continued them for fourteen years longer, for the most of the time in the Netherlands, his death resulting from accident in 1865.

By common consent he is ranked in the highest order of popular preachers.