As the real owner of a homestead has most reason to dread a dealer in false titles, so the truly free man has most reason to dread false liberty.

Isaac Hecker was the type of rational individual liberty, hence the very man to abhor most the caricature of that prerogative in the typical Protestant.
Five years before his death, in an article in _The Catholic World_ entitled "Luther and the Diet of Worms," Father Hecker put the case thus: "It is a misapprehension common among Protestants to suppose that Catholics, in refusing the appeal of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, condemn the use of reason or individual judgment, or whatever one pleases to call the personal act which involves the exercise of man's intellect and free will.

The truth is, personal judgment flows from what constitutes man a rational being, and there is no power under heaven that can alienate personal judgment from man, nor can man, if he would, disappropriate it.

The cause of all the trouble at the Diet of Worms was not personal judgment, for neither party put that in question.

The point in dispute was the right application of personal judgment.