That powerful man and great prelate was a type of the best form of Catholicism at that day.
He was of the Church militant in more senses than one; and the military qualities which have inspired the public action of Catholic champions for the past three centuries were strongly developed in him.

That it was for the good of religion that it should have such characters as John Hughes to care for its public welfare there is no room to doubt.

Since then the temper of Protestant Americans has undergone a change which is almost radical.

It has grown infinitely more just and kindly towards Catholics.

The decay of the Protestant bond of cohesion from lapse of time and from the unsettlement of belief in its chief doctrines; the fighting of two wars, one of them the great Rebellion, which fused the populations of States and acquainted men better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop Hughes himself and of his contemporaries--these and other causes have made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a different spirit from what wisdom dictated fifty years ago.
If Dr.Seabury owned to schism and lack of discipline in Anglicanism, Bishop John Hughes brought out to Isaac Hecker the very contrary as the attractive qualities of Catholicity.