A more explicit statement of the supernatural influences by means of which God informed him of his mission was made in after years to various persons, singly and in common. It was to the effect that the Holy Spirit gave him a distinct and unmistakable intimation that he was set apart to undertake, in some leading and conspicuous way, the conversion of this country. That this intimation came to him while he was at Wittem is also certain; but it is equally so that he had premonitions of it during the novitiate. It was the incongruity of such a persuasion being united to a helpless inactivity of mind in matters of study that made Isaac Hecker a puzzle to his very self, to say nothing of those who had to decide his place in the order. 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. But how holy a fool he was his superiors soon discovered. We find the following among the memoranda:
"Père L'hoir was my superior in the studentate. He was a holy man and a good friend, but he was surprised at my state of prayer. He asked me how it could happen that I, a convert of only a few years, should have a state of prayer he had not attained though in the Church all his life and striving for perfection. I told him that it was God's will to set apart some men for a certain work and specially prepare them for it, and cause them, as He had me, to be brought under the influence of special Divine graces from boyhood. L'hoir then began to send anybody with difficulties to me, and God gave me grace to settle them. Then murmurs arose that he was too much under my influence, and he was removed from his position over the studies. But afterwards they replaced him; he was very efficient in his place."