Life of Father Hecker

TOWARDS the close of the eighteenth century a German clockmaker named Engel Freund, accompanied by his wife and children, left his native town of Elberfeld, in Rhenish Prussia, to seek a new home in America. There is a family tradition to the effect that his forefathers were French, and that they came into Germany on account of some internal commotion in their own country.

The name makes it more probable that they were Alsatians who quietly moved across the Rhine, either when their province was first ceded to France, or perhaps later, at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. When Engel Freund quitted Germany the disturbing influences of the French Revolution may have had a considerable share in determining his departure. He landed at New York in 1797 and established himself in Hester Street, between Christie and Forsyth.

His wife, born Ann Elizabeth Schneider, in 1764, was a native of Frankenburg, Hesse Cassel. She became the mother of a son and several daughters, who attained maturity and settled in New York. As his girls grew into womanhood and married, Engel Freund, who was a thrifty and successful tradesman in his prime, dowered each of them with a house in his own neighborhood, seeking thus to perpetuate in the new the kindly patriarchal customs of the old land.

To the New-Yorker of to-day, or, indeed, to any reputable and industrious immigrant, the notion of settling a family in Hester Street could not seem other than grotesque. It is now the filthy and swarming centre of a very low population. The Jewish pedlar par éminence lives there and thereabouts. Signs painted in the characters of his race, not of his accidental nationality, abound on every side. Here a synagogue occupies the story above a shop; there Masonic symbols are exhibited between the windows in a similar location. Jewish faces of the least prepossessing type look askance into eyes which they recognize as both unfamiliar and observant. Women, unkempt and slouchy, or else arrayed in dubious finery, brush against one. At intervals fast growing greater the remains of an extinct domesticity and privacy still show themselves in the shape of old-fashioned brick or wooden houses with Dutch gables or Queen Anne fronts, but for the most part tall tenement-houses, their lower stories uniformly given up to some small traffic, claim exclusive right of possession. The sidewalks are crowded with the stalls of a yet more petty trade; the neighborhood is full of unpleasant sights, unwholesome odors, and revolting sounds.

But the Hester Street of seventy years ago and more was another matter. When a canal flowed through Canal Street, and tall trees growing on either side of it sheltered the solid and roomy houses of retired merchants and professional men, Hester Street was a long way up town. Seven years before the subject of the present biography was born, that elegantly proportioned structure, the City Hall, which had then been nine years a-building, was finished in material much less expensive than had been intended when it was begun. Marble was very dear, reasoned the thrifty and far-sighted City Fathers of the day, and as the population of New York were never likely to settle to any extent above Chambers Street, the rear of the hall would be seen so seldom that this economy would not be noticeable. What is now Fourteenth Street was then a place given over to market-gardens. Rutgers Street, Rutgers Place, Henry Street, were fashionable localities, and the adjacent quarter, now so malodorous and disreputable, was eminently respectable. Freund's daughters, as they left the parental roof for modest houses of his gift close by, no doubt had reason to consider themselves abundantly fortunate in their surroundings.

One of these daughters, Caroline Sophia Susanna Henrietta Wilhelmina, born in Elberfeld on the 2d of March, 1796, was still a babe in arms at the time of the family emigration. She was a tall, fair, handsome girl, not long past her fifteenth birthday when she became a wife. Her husband, John Hecker, was nearly twice her age, having been born in Wetzlar, Prussia, May 7, 1782. He was the son of another John Hecker, a brewer by trade, who married the daughter of a Colonel Schmidt. Both parents were natives of Wetzlar. Their son learned the business of a machinist and brass-founder, and emigrated to America in 1800. He was married to Caroline Freund in the Old Dutch Church in the Swamp, July 21, 1811. He died in New York, in the house of his eldest son, July 10, 1860.

Events proved John Hecker to have been equally fortunate and sagacious in his choice of a wife. At the time of their marriage he was thrifty and well-to-do. At one period he owned a flourishing brass-foundry in Hester Street, and during his early married life his prosperity was uninterrupted. But before many years had passed his business declined, and from one cause and another he never succeeded in re-establishing it. This misfortune, occurring while even the eldest of the sons was still a lad, might easily have proved irreparable in more senses than one. But the very fact that the ordinary gates to learning were so soon closed against these children caused the natural tendency they had toward knowledge to impel them all the more strongly in that shorter road to practical wisdom which leads through labor and experience. The Hecker brothers were all hard at work while still mere children, and before John, the eldest, had attained to legal manhood, they had fixed the solid foundations of an enduring prosperity, and all need of further exertion on the part of their parents was over for ever.

Isaac Thomas Hecker, the third son and youngest child of this couple, was born in New York at a house in Christie Street, between Grand and Hester, December 18, 1819, when his mother was not yet twenty-four. He survived her by twelve years only, she dying at the residence of her eldest son's widow in 1876, in the full possession of faculties which must have been of no common order. From her, and through her from Engel Freund, who was what is called "a character," Father Hecker seems to have derived many of his life-long peculiarities. "I never knew a son so like his mother," writes to us one who had an intimate acquaintance with both of them for more than forty years. She adds:

"Mrs. Hecker was a woman of great energy of character and strong religious nature. Her son, Father Hecker, inherited both of these traits, and there was the warmest sympathy between them. He was her youngest son, her baby, she called him, but with all her tender love she had a holy veneration for his character as priest.

"She deeply sympathized with him through the trials and anxieties that were his in his search after truth, and when his heart found rest, and the aspirations of his soul were answered in the Holy Catholic Church, her noble heart accepted for him what she could not see for herself. She said to a lady who spoke to her on the subject and who could not be reconciled to the conversion of a daughter: 'No, I would not change the faith of my sons. They have found peace and joy in the Catholic Church, and I would not by a word change their faith, if I could.'"

"She had a very earnest temperament, and what she did she did with all her heart. The last years of her life she was a great invalid, but from her sick room she did wonders. Family ties were kept warm, and no one whom she had loved and known was forgotten. The poor were ever welcome, and came to her in crowds, never leaving without help and consolation. She had a very cheerful spirit, and a bright, pleasant, and even witty word for every one.

"But the strongest trait in her character was her deeply religious nature. With the Catholic faith it would have found expression in the religious life, as she sometimes said herself. The faith she had made her most earnest and devout, according to her light."

Mrs. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, who spent a month at the house in Rutgers Street just after Isaac finally returned from Brook Farm, when Mrs. Hecker was in the prime of middle life, speaks of her as "a lovely and dignified character, full of 'humanities.' She was fair, tall, erect, a very superior example of the German house-mother. Hers was the controlling spirit in the house, and her wise and generous influence was felt far beyond it. She was a life-long Methodist, and took me with her to a 'Love Feast,' which I had never witnessed before."

To the good sense, good temper, and strong religious nature of Caroline Hecker her children owed, and always cordially acknowledged, a heavy, and in one respect an almost undivided, debt of gratitude. Neither Engel Freund nor John Hecker professed any religious faith. The latter was never in the habit of attending any place of worship. Both were Lutheran so far as their antecedents could make them so, but neither seems to have practically known much beyond the flat negation, or at best the simple disregard, of Christianity to which Protestantism leads more or less quickly according as the logical faculty is more or less developed in those whose minds have been fed upon it. However, there was nothing aggressive in the attitude of either toward religious observance. The grandfather especially seems to have been a "gentle sceptic," an agnostic in the germ, affirming nothing beyond the natural, probably because all substantial ground for supernatural affirmations seemed to him to be cut away by the fundamental training imparted to him. He was a kindly, virtuous, warm-hearted man, with a life of his own which made him incurious and thoughtful, and singularly devoid of prejudices. When his daughter Caroline elected to desert the Reformed Dutch Church in which the family had a pew, and to attach herself to another sect, he had only a jocular word of surprise to say concerning her odd fancy for "those noisy Methodists." He had a true German fondness for old ways and settled customs, and to the end of his days spoke only his own vernacular.

"Why don't you talk English?" somebody once asked him toward the close of his life.

"I don't know how," he answered. "I never had time to learn."

"Why, how long have you been here?"

"About forty years."

"Forty years! And isn't that time enough to learn English in?"

"What can one learn in forty years?" said the old man, with an unanswerable twinkle.

Between him and the youngest of his Hecker grandchildren there existed a singular sympathy and affection. The two were very much together, and the little fellow was allowed to potter about the workshop and encouraged to study the ins and outs of all that went on there, as well as entertained with kindly talk that may at first have been a trifle above his years. But he was a precocious child, shrewd, observant, and thoughtful. It was in the old watchmaker's shop that the boy, not yet a dozen years old, and already hard at work helping to earn his own living, conceived the plan of making a clock with his own hands and presenting it to the church attended by the family, which was situated in Forsyth Street between Walker and Hester. The clock was finished in due time and set up in the church, where it ticked faithfully until the edifice was torn down, some forty years later. Then it was returned to its maker in accordance with a promise made by the pastor when the gift was accepted. In 1872 the opening number of the third volume of The Young Catholic contained a good engraving of it, accompanied by a sketch descriptive of its career. Although Father Hecker did not write the little story, it is so true both to fact and to sentiment that we make an extract from it. The clock hung in the Paulist sacristy for about ten years. Then, for some reason, it was taken to the country house of Mr. George Hecker, where it was accidentally destroyed by fire:

"There were points of resemblance in my own and my boy maker's nature. In him, regularity, order, and obedience were fixed principles; and with us both, Time represented Eternity. As the days of his young manhood came his pursuits and tastes in life changed. Deep thought took possession of his mind, and with it a tender love for souls and a heart-hungriness for a further knowledge of what man was given a soul for, and the way in which he was to save it. As these thoughts were maturing in his mind I often noticed his troubled look. One Sunday in particular, he lingered behind the congregation and stood before me, with a new expression in his keen gray eye; and amid the silence of the deserted aisles he thus apostrophized me: 'Farewell, old friend! fashioned by these hands, thou representest Truth, the eternal. What man is ever seeking, through me thou hast found. Here I stand, not man's but God's noblest work, as yet not having repaid my Maker with one act of duty or of service. Thou hast faithfully performed thy mission; henceforth I labor to perform mine.' With a grave and sad look my boy maker, now a young man, left me. I felt then that we had looked our last upon each other in this place; but little did either of us dream of where, when, and how we would meet again. For thirty-five years I labored on unchanged, though I must own to having had some ailments now and then. About this period of my existence I overheard straggling remarks, as the worshippers passed out of the church, which led me to conclude that some change was contemplated, and my suspicions were confirmed by the rector proposing from the pulpit the erection of a new church edifice in another part of the city, to be fashioned after a more modern style of architecture. . . . In accordance with the promise made my boy maker, I was to go back to him. My heart bounded at the prospect. Never in all those years had I seen him. . . .

"In a short time I learned that the author of my existence, after many hard struggles and trials, had at last found truth and light, peace and rest, in the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church. He had returned, when he found me, from the Plenary Council of 1867. He is now a priest, and the head of a religious community. Need I assure those who have been interested in my history that I also have found a home in the same community, where I am consecrated to its use? I am no longer alone now; I am busy from morning until night, helping to regulate the movements of the community. There is not an hour in the day when I do not see my boy maker. We have established sympathies in common; I call him to prayers, to his meals, to his matins, and to his rest. Many a time, when he finds me alone, he gives me some spiritual reading, or says aloud some prayers. Every time I strike, he breathes an aspiration of love and thanksgiving. In short, we have found our glorious mission in our new birth. We are both apostles: I represent Time; he preaches of Eternity."

There can be little doubt, however, that the chief formative influence in the Hecker household was that which came directly through the mother. Young as she was when an unduly heavy share of the domestic burdens fell to her portion, she took it up with courage and bore it with dignity and fidelity. What aid her father could give her was doubtless not lacking, but we may well suppose that, as age crept on Engel Freund, his business began to slip away from him into younger hands. He was probably no longer in a position to endow daughters or to undertake the education of grandchildren. What is certain is that Caroline Hecker's boys, after very brief school-days, were put at once to hard work. What decided their choice of an occupation is not so sure, but in all probability they consulted with their mother and then took the common-sense view that as there is a never-failing market for food staples, even poverty, if mated with diligence and sagacity, may find there a fair field for successful enterprise. John, the eldest, upon whom the mother soon began to rely as her right hand, went to learn his trade as a baker with a Mr. Schwab, whose shop was on the corner of Hester and Eldridge Streets. George, who was some three or four years younger, as the only girl, Elizabeth, came between them, presently followed his brother to the same business.

As for Isaac, whom hard necessity, or, more probably, a mistaken thrift, likewise forced away from school when not much more than ten years old, his earliest ventures bear a curious symbolic likeness to his latest. He earned his first wages in the service of a religious periodical, the Methodist publication still known as Zion's Herald, whose office was situated in Crosby Street near Broadway. From there he went to learn a trade in the type foundry in Great Thames Street. But as it was already apparent that the family road to prosperity was identical with that chosen by his elder brothers, we find him working away beside them in the bake-house by the time he was eleven. They had already established the bakery in Rutgers Street, between Monroe and Cherry, where the family lived for so many years. They had another shop in Pearl Street, to which Isaac used to carry bread every morning.

This was a part of his life to which he was fond of recurring in his last years. "Thanks be to God!" he said on the first day of 1886, "how hard we used to work preparing for New Year's Day! Three weeks in advance we began to bake New Year's cakes-flour, water, sugar, butter, and caraway seeds. We never could make enough. How I used to work carrying the bread around in my baker's cart! How often I got stuck in the gutters and in the snow! Sometimes some good soul, seeing me unable to get along, would give me a lift. I began to work when I was ten and a half years old, and I have been at it ever since."

And again, a few days later, as a poor woman carrying a heavy basket passed him in the street, he said to the companion of his walk: "I have had the blood spurt out of my arm carrying bread when I was a baker. A lady asked me once for a hundred dollars to help her send her only son to college. I answered her that my mother had four children and got along without begging, and that I would not exchange one year of those I spent working for several at college."

Less than a month before his death he fell into conversation with a newsboy on the corner near the Paulist church in Fifty-ninth Street. "It interested me very much," he said afterwards. "I found out that he is one of five little brothers, and their mother is a widow. She is trying to bring them up, poor thing! It reminds me of my own mother."

It is plain that there could not have been much room for formal study in a life of hard physical labor, so soon begun and so unremittingly continued during the years usually given up to school work. An ordinary boy, placed in such circumstances, would doubtless have grown up ignorant and unformed. But while none of the Hecker boys was quite of the ordinary stamp, Isaac was distinctly sui generis and individual. He has said of himself that he could remember no period of his life when he had not the consciousness of having been sent into the world for some especial purpose. What it was he knew not, but expectation and desire for the withheld knowledge kept him pondering and self-withdrawn. Once in his childhood he was given over for death with a bad attack of confluent small-pox, and his mother came to his bedside to tell him so. "No, mother," he answered her, "I shall not die now. God has a work for me to do in the world, and I shall live to do it."

Such instruction as Isaac obtained before beginning to earn his own bread was given him in Ward School No. 7. A Dr. Kirby was then its principal, and the time was just previous to the introduction of the present system. The schools were not entirely free, a small payment being required from the parents for each pupil, to supplement the grant of public funds. No doubt the boy, who had an ardent thirst for knowledge, regretted his removal from his desk more deeply than he was at the time willing to express. Still, it may be questioned whether he ever had any natural aptitude for close, continuous book-work, at least on ordinary and prescribed lines. He was "always studying," indeed, as he sometimes said in speaking of his early life, but the thoughts of other men, whether written or spoken, do not seem to have been greatly valued by him, except as keys which might help him to unlock those mysteries of God and man, and their mutual relations, which tormented him from the first. He was to the last an indefatigable reader, but yet it would be true to say that he was never either a student or a scholar in the ordinary sense. It is a curious question as to how a thorough education might have modified Father Hecker. It is possible-nay, as the reader may be inclined to believe with us as the story of his inner life goes on, it is even probable-that the more he was taught by God the less he was able to receive from men.

It is certain, however, that he seriously regretted and soon set himself to rectify the deficiencies of his early training. This was one of the reasons which took him to Brook Farm. In the first entry of the earliest of his diaries which has been preserved he thus speaks of his hidden longing after knowledge. He was twenty-three when these sentences were written, and he had been at Brook Farm for several months:

"If I cast a glance upon a few years of my past life, it appears to me mysteriously incomprehensible that I should be where I am now. I confess sincerely that, although I have never labored for it, still, something in me always dreamed of it. Once, when I was lying on the floor, my mother said to my brother John, without anything previously being spoken on the subject, and suddenly, in a kind of unconscious speech, 'John, let Isaac go to college and study.' These words went through me like liquid fire. He made some evasive answer and there it ended. Although to study has always been the secret desire of my heart from my youth, I never felt inclined to open my mind to any one on the subject. And now I find, after a long time, that I have been led here as strangely as possible."

His childhood seems to have been a serious one. In recurring to it in later life, as he often did, he never spoke of any games or sports in which he had shared, nor, in fact, of any amusements before the time when he began to attend lectures and the theatre. It was the childhood of what we call in America a self-made man-one in which the plastic human material is rudely dealt with by circumstances. His mother taught him his prayers, the schoolmistress his letters, necessity his daily round of duties, and for the rest he was left very much to himself and to that interior Master of whose stress and constraint upon him he grew more intimately conscious as he grew in years. The force of this inward pressure showed itself in many ways. Outwardly it made his manner undemonstrative, and fixed an intangible yet very real barrier between him and his kindred, even when the affection that existed was extremely close and tender. From infancy he exhibited that repugnance to touching or being touched by any one which marked him to the end. Even his mother refrained from embracing him, knowing this singular aversion. She would stroke his face, instead, when she was pleased with him, and say, "That is my kiss for you, my son."

The mutual respect for each other's personalities shown in this closest of human relations was characteristic of the entire family, as will be seen later, when the nature of the business connections between Isaac and his brothers has to be considered. Far from weakening the natural ties, or impairing their proper influence, it seems to have strengthened and perfected them. Asked once towards the close of his life how it was that he had never used tobacco in any form, he answered: "Mother forbade it, and that was enough for George and me. I was never ruled in any way but by her affection. That was sufficient." The parallel fact that he never in his life drank a drop of liquor at a bar or at any public place was probably due to a similar injunction. The children were brought up, too, with exceedingly strict ideas about lying and stealing, and all petty vices. Throughout the family there prevailed an extreme severity on such faults. "I have never forgotten," said Father Hecker, "the furious anger of an aunt of mine and the violent beating she gave one of my cousins for stealing a cent from her drawer. That training has had a great and lasting effect upon my character."

In such antecedents and surroundings it is easy to see the source of that abiding confidence in human nature, and that love for the natural virtues which marked Father Hecker's whole career. They had kept his own youth pure. He had been baptized in infancy, however, as the children of orthodox Protestants more commonly were at that period than at present, and in all probability validly, so that one could never positively say that nature in him had ever been unaided by grace in any particular instance. It is the conviction of those who knew him best that he had never been guilty of deliberate mortal sin. One of these writes:

"During all the intimate hours I spent with him, speaking of his past life he ever once said that he had been a sinner in a sense to convey the idea of mortal sin. And on the other hand he said much to the contrary; so much as to leave no manner of doubt on my mind that he had kept his baptismal innocence. He was deeply attached to an edifying and religious mother; he was at hard work before the dawn of sensual passion, and his recreation, even as a boy, was in talking and reading about deep social and philosophical questions, and listening to others on the same themes. He expressly told me that he had never used drink in excess, and that he had never sinned against purity, never was profane, never told a lie; and he certainly never was dishonest.

"The influence of his mother was of the most powerful kind. He told me that the severest punishment she ever inflicted on him was once or twice (once only, I am pretty sure) to tell him that she was angry with him; and this so distressed him that he was utterly miserable, sat down on the floor completely overcome, and so remained till she after a time relented and restored him to favor. Such a relationship is quite instructive in reference to the original innocence of his life."

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It has been said already, in speaking of Father Hecker's childhood, that he had been consciously under the influence of supernatural impressions from a very early period. It seems probable, therefore, that at least during the few years which preceded his juvenile plunge into politics he must have been devout and prayerful, though doubtless in his own spontaneous way.

Such were his mother's characteristics, and we find her son writing to her, when his aspirations after the perfect life had led him to the threshold of the church, that she, of all persons, ought most to sympathize with him, for he is about doing that which will aid him to be what she has always desired to see him. But his devotions probably bore small resemblance to those of the ordinary religiously minded boy, either Catholic or Protestant. He has said that often at night, when lying on the shavings before the oven in the bake-house, he would start up, roused in spite of himself by some great thought, and run out upon the wharves to look at the East River in the moonlight, or wander about under the spell of some resistless aspiration. What does God desire from me? How shall I attain unto Him? What is it He has sent me into the world to do? These were the ceaseless questions of a heart that rested, meanwhile, in an unshaken confidence that time would bring the answer.

But these were early days, days when the influence of his mother, never wholly shaken off, was still dominant and pervasive in all that concerned him. There came a period, however, beginning in all likelihood about his fourteenth, and lasting until his twentieth year or thereabouts, in which he certainly lost hold on all distinctively Christian doctrines. With such a mind as his, and such a training, this was almost inevitable. His intellect, while it hungered incessantly after supernatural truth, kept nevertheless a persistent hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until it had synthetized them into a coherent whole. That was his life-long characteristic. During the years of painful ill health which preceded his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to the supernatural as if by instinct. "But I am a Saxon and cling to the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed." He attributed this to his racial peculiarities. Others may differ with him and credit it to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity. Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised. He could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to command. He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary master.

Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of orthodox Protestantism, was certain to reject it sooner or later, impelled by hunger for the whole Divine gift of which that teaching contains fragments only. The soul of Isaac Hecker was one athirst for God from the first dawn of its conscious being. Upon Him, its Creator and Source, it never lost hold, and never ceased to cry out for Him with longing and aspiration, even during that bitter and protracted period of his youth when his mind, entangled in the maze of philosophic subjectivism, seemed in danger of rejecting theism altogether. But the underpinning of his faith, so far as that professed to be Christian and to come by hearing-to have an intellectual basis, that is-began to slip away almost as soon as he left his mother's knee. It is possible that very little stress was ever laid upon distinctively Christian doctrines in her teaching. To adore God the Creator, to listen to His voice in conscience, to live honestly and purely as in His sight-the heritage she transmitted to him probably contained little more than this. Like most others reared in heresy who afterwards attain to the true knowledge of the Incarnation, he had to seek for it with almost as great travail of mind as if he had been born a pagan. It cannot be too strongly insisted on, however, that his struggles were merely intellectual, and, when they began to take a definite turn, shaped themselves into the natural result of a metaphysic as repugnant to common sense as it is to Christian philosophy. To this fact, so important in certain of its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on. They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda, jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last years of his life, by one whom he admitted to an unusually close intimacy. He was always singularly reserved concerning matters purely personal; his confidences, when they touched his own soul, seldom seemed entirely voluntary, and were quickly checked. Occasionally they were taken by surprise, as when the course of talk insensibly turned toward internal ways; and again they were deliberately angled for with a hook so well concealed that it secured a prize before he was aware. From these notes we shall here make a few quotations bearing on the point made above-i.e., that his difficulties prior to his entrance into the church were neither moral nor spiritual, but intellectual. Of him, if of any man, it was always true that his heart was naturally Christian. The first of these extracts, bearing as it does on a topic constantly in his thoughts, affords a good enough example of what was meant in saying that his confidences were sometimes taken by surprise:

"There are some for whom the predominant influence is the external one, authority, example, precept, and the like. Others in whose lives the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates. In my case, from my childhood God influenced me by an interior light and by the interior touch of His Holy Spirit."

At another time he said:

"While I was a youth, and in early manhood, I was preserved from certain sins and certain occasions of sin, in a way that was peculiar and remarkable. I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the time, conscious that God was preserving me innocent with a view to some future providence. Mind, all this was long before I came into the church."

And again:

"Many a time before my conversion God gave me grace to weep over those words: 'And all those who love His coming.' I did not believe in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to believe it. I had learned much of the Bible from my mother and had read it often and much myself."

This consciously supernatural character of his inner life from the first, should be kept closely united in the reader's mind with that other idea of his adhesion to "guileless nature" which was such a favorite theme with Father Hecker. No one could be more emphatic than he in asserting the necessity of the supernatural for the attainment of man's destiny. How could it be otherwise, when he considered that destiny to be the elevation of man above all good merely human, and by means far beyond the compass of his natural powers? Still, this was undoubtedly a conclusion of his riper years, a result arrived at after a certain intense if not very prolonged experience in contemporary Utopias, in futile endeavors to raise man above his own level while remaining on it, whether by socialistic schemes or social politics.

In an article called "Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," published in The Catholic World of May, 1887, Father Hecker has himself made some interesting references to his experiences in the latter field, and upon these we shall draw heavily for our own account of this period of his life, supplementing them with whatever bears upon the subject in the memoranda already referred to.

Concerning the inception of this party, to which all three of the young Heckers belonged in 1834, we have a better statement in Dr. Brownson's Convert than we know of elsewhere. Brownson was for a time actively interested in it, and in 1829 established a journal in support of its principles somewhere in Western New York. From him we learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L. Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting control of political power so as to use it for establishing purely secular schools. Their advocacy of anti-Christian and free-love doctrines had so signally failed among adult Americans that the slower but surer method of educating the children of the country without religion had dawned upon them as more certain to succeed.

"We hoped," writes Dr. Brownson, "by linking our cause with the ultra-democratic sentiment of the country, which had had from the time of Jefferson and Tom Paine something of an anti-Christian character; by professing ourselves the bold and uncompromising champions of equality; by expressing a great love for the people and a deep sympathy with the laborer, whom we represented as defrauded and oppressed by his employer; by denouncing all proprietors as aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopular features of our plan as far in the background as possible, to enlist the majority of the American people under the banner of the Workingman's party; nothing doubting that, if we could once raise that party to power, we could use it to secure the adoption of our educational system."

This party, however, both as an engine in politics and as a fitting embodiment of his private views, Dr. Brownson soon abandoned. He was not truly radical, in the evil sense of that word, at any period of his career, and the theories of the leaders soon became insupportable to his moral sense. But he remained true to the cause of the workingmen while abandoning the organization which assumed to voice their needs and their wishes. Probably these more ulterior aims of their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of those who followed them. Yet the genesis of the present purely secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property, and marriage was then an offence in the nostrils of our people at large. It is fair to predict that this generation, or another which shall succeed it, will yet have the good sense to regret, and the courage to atone for, the fact that hatred to the Catholic Church, and a desire to cripple her hands where her own children were concerned, should have been a more powerful agent in dragging them and theirs into the abyss of secularism than was their love of Christianity in deterring them from it.

Father Hecker's account of his own youthful connection with the "Workingman's Democracy," although written with the direct intention of placing his estimate of Dr. Brownson on record, has too many strictly autobiographic touches in it to be here omitted. Such passages, bearing on long past personal history, are fewer than we could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished. The five articles on Dr. Brownson, beginning in The Catholic World of April, 1887, and concluding in November of the same year, contain almost the only matters relative to his personal history which he ever put into print. Concerning the party, of which Dr. Brownson says that he had ceased to be a recognized leader at this time, although he still threw his influence as a speaker into all its projects for social reform, Father Hecker writes:

"We called ourselves the genuine Democracy, and in New York City were for some years a separate political body, independent of the 'regular' Democracy, and voting our own ticket. I have before me the files of our newspaper organ, the Democrat, the first number of which appeared March 9, 1836, published by Windt & Conrad, 11 Frankfort Street. In its prospectus the Democrat promises to contend for 'Equality of Rights, often trampled in the dust by Monopoly Democrats,' to battle 'with an aristocratic opposition powerful in talent and official entrenchment, and mighty in money and facilities for corruption.' 'In the course of this duty it will not fail fearlessly and fully to assert the inalienable rights of the people['] against 'vested rights' and 'vested wrongs.' It claims to be the 'instructive companion' of the mechanics' and workingmen's leisure, 'the promotion of whose interests will ever form a leading feature of the Democrat.' And in the editorial salutatory it speaks thus:

"'We are in favor of government by the people. Our objects are the restoration of equal rights and the prostration of those aristocratical usurpations existing in the state of monopolies and exclusive privileges of every kind, the products of corrupt and corrupting legislation. . . . At this moment we are the only large nation on the face of the earth where the mass of the people govern in theory-where they may govern in reality, if they will-where the real taxes of government, although too heavy, are but trifling, and where a majority of the population depend on their own labor for support; yet such is the condition of that large class that the fruits of their toil are inadequate to sustain themselves in comfort and rear their families as the young citizens of a republic ought to be reared.

"'. . . He is very shortsighted, however, who thinks that a majority of the people, where universal suffrage exists, will submit long to a state of toil and mendicity. The majority would soon learn to exercise its political rights, and command its representatives to carry the laws abolishing primogeniture and entails one step further, and stop all devises of land and prohibit it from being an article of sale. (In a foot-note of the editorial:) We actually heard these and several such propositions discussed by a number of apparently very intelligent mechanics, after the adjournment of a meeting called to consider the subject of wages, rents, etc.'

"At that time the main question was the condition of the public finances, and our agitation was directed chiefly against granting charters to private banks of circulation. We condemned these as monopolies, for we were hostile to all monopolies-that is to say, to the use of public funds or the enjoyment of public exclusive privileges by any man or association or class of men for their private profit."

We interrupt our direct quotation from this article in order to relate one of the humors of the period, so far as these brothers were concerned, in the words of the late Mr. George Hecker:

"When we were bakers the money in common use was the old-fashioned paper issued by private banks under State charters. We were regularly against it. So we bought a hand printing-press and set it up in the garret of our establishment. All the bills we received from our customers, some thousands sometimes every week, we smoothed out and put in a pile, and then printed on their backs a saying we took from Daniel Webster (though I believe it was not quite authentic): 'Of all the contrivances to impoverish the laboring classes of mankind, paper money is the most effective. It fertilizes the rich man's field with the poor man's sweat.' They tried to punish us for defacing money, but we beat them. We didn't deface it; we only printed something on the back of it. Isaac and I often worked all night putting up handbills for our meetings, for in those days there were no professional bill-posters."

Father' Hecker's acquaintance with Dr. Brownson, which had so powerful an effect upon his future career, began in 1834, when Brownson was invited to lecture in New York in favor of the principles and aims of this party. Isaac was then in his fifteenth year. Among the conversations recorded in the memoranda we find this reference to their earliest interview:

"I first met Dr. Brownson in New York, in our house. I was then reading the Washington Globe, Benton's speeches, Calhoun's, etc. The elder Blair was its editor; its motto was, 'The world is governed too much'-a motto in whose spirit there could be no great movement except in the way of revolution. After the establishment of the American Government the principle expressed in that motto could only be abandoned or pushed into revolution and anarchy.

"I put this question to Brownson: 'How can I become certain of the objective reality of the operations of my soul?' He answered: 'If you have not yet reached that period of mental life, you will do so before many years.'

"It is a great humiliation for me to admit that I was ever in a state in which I doubted the actual validity of the testimony of my own faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence. I had begun my mental life in politics, and in a certain sense in religion; but to my philosophical life I was yet unborn."

In the article on the "Workingman's Party," already quoted from, Father Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to lecture before the New York members of the party for several years, goes on as follows:

"If it be asked why a man like Dr. Brownson, a born philosopher, should have thus busied himself with the solution of the most practical of problems by undertaking to abolish inequality among men, the answer is plain. The true philosopher will not confine himself to abstract theories. But, furthermore, Brownson at this epoch of his life had lost his grip on the philosophy that leads men to trust in a supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man who does not look to the hope of a future state of beatitude for the chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end. If a man does not seek beatitude in God he seeks it in himself and his fellow-men-in the highest earthly development of our better nature if he becomes a socialist of one school, and in the lusts of the animal man if he becomes a socialist of the brutal school. The man who has any sympathy in his heart and is not guided by Catholic ethics, if he reasons at all on public affairs, will become a socialist of some school or other. Says Dr. Brownson in The Convert, p. 101:

"The end of man, as disclosed by my creed of 1829, is obviously an earthly end, to be attained in this life. Man was not made for God, and destined to find his beatitude in the possession of God his Supreme Good, the Supreme Good itself. His end was happiness-not happiness in God, but in the possession of the good things of this world. Our Lord had said, 'Be not anxious as to what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed; for after all these things do the heathen seek.' I gave Him a flat denial, and said, Be anxious; labor especially for these things, first for yourselves, then for others. Enlarging, however, my views a little, I said, Man's end for which he is to labor is the well-being and happiness of man in this world-is to develop man's whole nature, and so to organize society and government as to secure all men a paradise on the earth. This view of the end to labor for I held steadily and without wavering from 1828 till 1842, when I began to find myself tending unconsciously towards the Catholic Church.'

"The reader will have seen by the extracts given that we were a party full of enthusiasm. I was but fifteen when our party called Dr. Brownson to deliver the lectures above mentioned. But my brothers and I had long been playing men's parts in politics. I remember when eleven years of age, or a year or two older, being tall for my years, proposing and carrying through a series of resolutions on the currency question at our ward meetings. As our name indicates- 'Workingman's Democracy'-we were a kind of Democrats. As to the Whig party, it received no great attention from us. At that time its chances of getting control of this State or of the United States were remote. Our biggest fight was against the 'usages of the party' as in vogue in the so-called regular Democracy embodied in the Tammany Hall party. This organization undertook to absorb us when we had grown too powerful to be ignored. They nominated a legislative ticket made up half of their men and half of ours. This move was to a great extent successful; but many of us who were purists refused to compromise, and ran a stump ticket, or, as it was then called, a rump ticket. I was too young to vote, but I remember my brother George and I posting political handbills at three o'clock in the morning; this hour was not so inconvenient for us, for we were bakers. We also worked hard on election day, keeping up and supplying the ticket booths, especially in our own ward, the old Seventh. I remember that one of our leaders was a shoemaker named John Ryker, and that we used to meet in Science Hall, Broome Street.

"If this was the high state of my enthusiasm, so was it that of us all. Our political faith was ardent and active. But if we had been tested on our religious faith we should not have come off creditably; many of us had not any religion at all. I remember saying once to my brother John that the only difference between a believer and an infidel is a few ounces of brains. . . . We were a queer set of cranks when Dr. Brownson brought to us his powerful and eloquent advocacy, his contribution of mingled truth and error. He delivered his first course of lectures in the old Stuyvesant Institute in Broadway, facing Bond Street-the same hall used a little afterwards by the Unitarian Society while they were building a church for Mr. Dewey in Broadway opposite Eighth Street, the very same society now established in Lexington Avenue, with Mr. Collyer as minister. The subsequent courses were delivered in Clinton Hall, corner of Nassau and Beekman, the site now occupied by one of our modern mammoth buildings. I forget how much we were charged admission, except that a ticket for the whole course cost three dollars. There was no great rush, but the lectures drew well and abundantly paid all expenses including the lecturer's fee. The press did not take much notice of the lectures, for the Workingman's party had no newspapers expressly in its favor, except the one I have already quoted from. But he was one of the few men whose power is great enough to advertise itself. Wherever he was he was felt. His tread was heavy and he could make way for himself.

"Dr. Brownson was then in the very prime of manhood. He was a handsome man, tall, stately, and of grave manners. His face was clean-shaved. The first likeness of him that I remember appeared in the Democratic Review. It made him look like Proudhon, the French Socialist. This was all the more singular because at that time he was really the American Proudhon, though he never went so far as 'La propriété, c'est le vol.' As he appeared on the platform and received our greeting he was indeed a majestic man, displaying in his demeanor the power of a mind altogether above the ordinary. But he was essentially a philosopher, and that means that he could never be what is called popular. He was an interesting speaker, but he never sought popularity. He never seemed to care much about the reception his words received, but he exhibited anxiety to get his thoughts rightly expressed and to leave no doubt about what his convictions were. Yet among a limited class of minds he always awakened real enthusiasm-among minds, that is, of a philosophical tendency. He never used manuscript or notes; he was familiar with his topic, and his thoughts flowed out spontaneously in good, pure, strong, forcible English. He could control any reasonable mind, for he was a man of great thoughts and never without some grand truth to impart. But to stir the emotions was not in his power, though he sometimes attempted it; he never succeeded in being really pathetic.

"It must be remembered that although Dr. Brownson was technically classed among the reverends, he was not commonly so called. It may be said that he was still reckoned among the Unitarian ministry, owing mostly to his connection with Dr. Channing, of Boston, who took a great interest in the Workingman's party. But I do not think he was advertised by us as reverend or publicly spoken of as a clergyman. He may have been yet hanging on the skirts of the Unitarian movement. But his career had become political, and his errand to New York was political. He had given up preaching for some years, and embarked on the stormy waves of social politics, and had by his writings become an expositor of various theories of social reform, chiefly those of French origin. So that the dominant note of his lectures was not by any means religious, but political. He was at that time considered as identified with the Workingman's party, and came to New York to speak as one of our leaders. The general trend of his lectures was the philosophy of history as it bears on questions of social reform. At bottom his theories were Saint-Simonism, the object being the amelioration of the condition of the most numerous classes of society in the speediest manner. This was the essence to our kind of Democracy. And Dr. Brownson undertook in these lectures to bring to bear in favor of our purpose the life-lessons of the providential men of human history. Of course, the life and teachings of our Saviour Jesus Christ were brought into use, and the upshot of the lecturer's thesis was that Christ was the big Democrat and the Gospel was the true Democratic platform!

"We interpreted Christianity as altogether a social institution, its social side entirely overlapping and hiding the religious. Dr. Brownson set out to make, and did make, a powerful presentation of our Lord as the representative of the Democratic side of civilization. For His person and office he and all of us had a profound appreciation and sympathy, but it was not reverential or religious; the religious side of Christ's mission was ignored. Christ was a social Democrat, Dr. Brownson maintained, and he and many of us had no other religion but the social theories we drew from Christ's life and teaching; that was the meaning of Christianity to us, and of Protestantism especially."

In penning the reminiscences just given Father Hecker probably had in mind the whole period lying between his fourteenth year and his twenty-first. In the autumn of 1834, when he first made acquaintance with Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker was not yet fifteen, while the reform lecturer was in his early thirties. But the boy who began at once, as he has told us, to put philosophical questions, and to seek a test whereby to determine the validity of his mental processes, was already well known to the voters of his ward, not merely as an overgrown and very active lad, always on hand at the polling booths, and ready for any work which might be entrusted to a boy, but also as a clear and persuasive speaker on various topics of social and political reform.

Politics of the kind into which the young Heckers threw themselves so ardently were not very different in their methods fifty years ago from what they are to-day. Reform politics are always the reverse of what are called machine politics. The meetings of which Father Hecker speaks were spontaneous gatherings of determined and earnest men, young and old, held sometimes in public halls, sometimes, when elections were close at hand, in the open street. Often they were dominated by leaders better able to formulate theories than to bring about practical remedial measures. The inception of all great parties has something of this character. It generally happens that principles are dwelt upon with an exclusive devotion more or less prejudicial to immediate practical ends. This is why young men, and even striplings, provided they are energetic and persuasive, will be listened to with attention at such eras. Men are seeking for enlightenment, and hence views are taken for what they seem to be worth rather than out of respect for the source they spring from. Imagine, then, this tall, fair, strong-faced boy of fourteen, mounted, perhaps, on one of his own flour-barrels, dogmatizing the principles of social democracy, posing as a spontaneous political reformer before a crowded street full of men twice and thrice his years, but bound together with him by the sympathies common to the wage-earning classes. It is true that Isaac Hecker and his brothers, of whom the eldest had but recently attained to the dignity of a voter, although still poor and hard-working, had already, by virtue of sheer industry and pluck, passed over to the class of wage-payers. But they were not less ardent reformers after than before that transition. Isaac at all events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind. Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice, and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local management of his party. In the article already quoted from, he tells us that after 1834 the managers left all future engagements of lecturers to his brother John and himself. It was doubtless this fact which led directly to that lasting and fruitful intimacy with Dr. Brownson which then began. His was the strongest purely human influence, if we except his mother's, which Isaac Hecker ever knew. And these two were on planes so different that it is hardly fair to compare them with each other.

________________________

A BRIEF consideration at this point of a certain permanent tendency of Father Hecker's mind will be of present and future value to the student of his life. It has been said already that he never changed the principles he had adopted as a lad among the apprentices and journeymen of New York; principles which, for all social politics, he summarized in the homely expression, "I am always for the under dog." Thus, in the article quoted in the preceding chapter, he had the right to say of himself and his associates:

"We were guileless men absorbed in seeking a solution for the problems of life. Nor, as social reformers at least, were we given over to theories altogether wrong. The constant recurrence of similar epochs of social agitation since then, and the present enormous development of the monopolies which we resisted in their very infancy, show that our forecast of the future was not wholly visionary. The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within the easy reach of State and national authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order."

We dwell on his political consistency, however, only because it affords an evidence of that unity of character which was always recognized in Father Hecker by those who knew him best. Change in him, in whatever direction it seemed to proceed, meant primarily the dropping off of accidental excrescences. There was nothing radical in it. What he once held with the settled allegiance of his intelligence he held always, adding to or developing it further as fast as the clouds were blown away from his mental horizon. From the standpoint of personal experience he could fairly criticise, as he did in conversation some few years before his death, Cardinal Newman's dictum that "conversion is a leap in the dark." "I say," he went on, "that it is a leap in the light." "Into the light, but through the dark," was suggested in reply.

"No," he answered. "If one arrives at a recognition of the truth of Catholic doctrine through one or other form of Protestant orthodoxy, then the difficulties of ordinary controversy will indeed leave him to the very end in the dark. But if he comes to the Church through the working and the results of natural reason, it is light all the way, and to the very end. I had this out with Cardinal Newman personally, and he agreed that I was right."

It is true that his views were rectified when he entered the Church, and that when once in it he was ever acquiring new truth and new views of truth. But his character never changed. He was a luminous example of the truth of the saying that the child is father to the man, so often apparently falsified by experience. Boy and man, the prominent characteristic of his mind was a clear perception of fundamentals and a disregard of non-essentials in the whole domain of life. To reverse a familiar maxim, "Take care of the dollars and the cents will take care of themselves," might describe his plan of mental economy. To the small coin of discussion in any field of inquiry he paid little attention. One who knew him many years has often heard him say, "Emphasize the universal always."

He was a teacher by natural vocation. No sooner was he satisfied that he knew anything of general moment than he felt pressed to impart his knowledge. Contact with him could never be simply for acquaintance' sake; still less for an idle comparison of views. While no man could be more frank in the admission of a lack of data on which to base an opinion in matters of fact, or a lack of illumination on affairs of conduct or practical direction, when such existed, yet to be certain was, to him, the self-luminous guarantee of his mission to instruct. But until that certainty was attained, in a manner satisfactory to both the intellectual and the ethical sides of his nature, he was silent.

As a priest, though he undertook to teach anybody and everybody, yet he could seldom have given the impression of desiring to impose his personal views, simply as such. His vital perception that there can be nothing private in truth shone through his speech too plainly for so gross a misconception to be easily made by candid minds. The fact is that the community of spiritual goods was vividly realized by him, and in good faith he credited all men with a longing like his own to see things as they really are. As he had by nature a very kindly manner, benignant and cheerful, the average man readily submitted to his influence. In his prime he was always a most successful and popular preacher and lecturer, from the combined effect of this earnestness of conviction and his personal magnetic quality. Men whose mental characteristics resembled his became, soon or late, his enthusiastic disciples, and as to others, although at first some were inclined to suspect him, many of them ended by becoming his warm friends.

It is in this light that we must view the precocious efforts of the young politician. Nothing was further from his thoughts at any time than to employ politics as a means to any private end. Although we have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature-a Stoic, not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of Father Hecker's interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even here without explaining that we use the word ascetic in its proper sense, to connote the rightful dominance of reason over appetite, the supremacy of the higher over the lower; not the jurisdiction of the judge over the criminal. In his case, during the greater part of his life, the adjustment of the higher and lower, the restraint he placed upon the beast in view of the elevation due to the man, was neither conceived nor felt as punitive. We shall see later on how God finally subjected him to a discipline so corrective as to be acknowledged by him as judicial.

Isaac Hecker threw himself into public questions, then, because, being a workman, he believed he saw ways by which the working classes might be morally and socially elevated. He wanted for his class what he wanted for himself. To get his views into shape, to press them with all his force whenever and wherever an opportunity presented itself, was for him the inescapable consequence of that belief. Like his great patron, St. Paul, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" was always his first question after his own illumination had been granted. There is a note in the collection of private memoranda that has been preserved, in which, alluding to the painful struggles which preceded his clear recognition that the doctrines of the Catholic Church afforded the adequate solution of all his difficulties, he says that his interior sufferings were so great that the question with him was "whether I should drown myself in the river or drown my longings and doubts in a career of wild ambition." Still, to those who knew him well, it is impossible to think of him as ever capable of any ambition which had not an end commensurate with mankind itself. To elevate men, to go up with them, not above them, was, from first to last, the scope of his desire. The nature of his surroundings in youth, his personal experience of the hardships of the poorer classes, his intercourse with radical socialists, together with the incomplete character of the religious training given him, made him at first look on politics as a possible and probable means to this desirable end. But he was too sensibly impelled by the Divine impulse toward personal perfection, and too inflexibly honest with himself, not to come early to a thorough realization, on one hand of the fact that man cannot, unaided, rise above his natural level, and, on the other, that no conceivable amelioration of merely social conditions could satisfy his aspirations. And if not his, how those of other men?

One thing that becomes evident in studying this period of Isaac Hecker's life is the fact that his acquaintance with Dr. Brownson marks a turning-point in his views, his opinions, his whole attitude of mind toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then the Saviour of men had been represented to him exclusively as a remedy against the fear of hell; His use seemed to be to furnish a Divine point to which men might work themselves up by an emotional process resulting in an assurance of forgiveness of sin and a secure hope of heaven. Christianity, that is to say, had been presented to him under the form of Methodism. The result had been what might have been anticipated in a nature so averse to emotional excitement and possessing so little consciousness of actual sin. Drawn to God as he had always been by love and aspiration, he was not as yet sensible of any gulf which needed to be bridged between him and his Creator; hence, to present Christ solely as the Victim, the Expiatory Sacrifice demanded by Divine Justice, was to make Him, if not impossible, yet premature to a person like him. Meantime, what he saw and heard all around him, poverty, inequality, greed, shiftlessness, low views of life, ceaseless and poorly remunerated toil, made incessant demands upon him. These things he knew by actual contact, by physical, mental, and moral experience, as a man knows by touch and taste and smell. Men's sufferings, longings, struggles, disappointments had been early thrust upon him as a personal and most weighty burden; and the only relief yet offered was the Christ of emotional Methodism. To a nature more open to temptation on its lower side, and hence more conscious of its radical limitations, even this defective presentation of the Redeemer of men might have appealed profoundly. But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it has from the beginning most vehemently rejected. As a negative force its essence is a protest against organic Christianity. As a positive force it is simply men, taken one by one, dealing separately with God concerning matters strictly personal. True, it is a fundamental verity that men must deal individually with God; but the external test that their dealings with Him have been efficacious, and their inspirations valid, is furnished by the fact of their incorporation into the organic life of Christendom. As St. Paul expresses it: "For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, are yet one body, so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free, and in one Spirit have we all been made to drink."*

[* I Cor. 12:12, 13.]

It is plain, then, that a religion such as Protestantism, which is unsocial and disintegrating by virtue of its antagonistic forces, can contribute little to the solution of social problems. Even when not actively rejected by men deeply interested in such problems, it is tolerably sure that it will be practically ignored as a working factor in their public relations with their fellows. Religion will remain the narrowly personal matter it began; chiefly an affair for Sundays; best attended to in one's pew in church or at the family altar. Probably it may reach the shop, the counter, and the scales; not so certainly the factory, the mine, the political platform, and the ballot. If Christianity had never presented itself under any other aspect than this to Isaac Hecker, it is certain that it would never have obtained his allegiance. Yet it is equally certain that he never rejected Christ under any aspect in which He was presented to him.

Even concerning the period of his life with which we are now engaged, and in which we have already represented him as having lost hold of all distinctively Christian doctrines, we must emphasize the precise words we have employed. He "lost hold"; that was because his original grasp was weak. While no authoritative dogmatic teaching had given him an even approximately full and definite idea of the God-man, His personality, His character, and His mission, the fragmentary truths offered him had made His influence seem restrictive rather than liberative of human energies. Yet even so he had not deliberately turned his back upon Him, though his tendency at this time was doubtless toward simple Theism. He had begun to ignore Christianity, simply because his own problems were dominantly social, and orthodox Protestantism, the only form of religion which he knew, had no social force corresponding to its pretensions and demands.

Now, upon this state of mind the teaching of Dr. Brownson came like seed upon a fallow soil. Like that which preceded it, it erred rather by defect than by actual or, at any rate, by wilful deviation from true doctrine. Isaac Hecker met for the first time in Orestes Brownson an exponent of Jesus Christ as the great Benefactor and Uplifter of the human race in this present life. Dr. Brownson has himself given a statement of the views which he held and inculcated between 1834 and 1843-which includes the period we are at present considering-and it is so brief and to the point that we cannot do better than to quote it:

"I found in me," he writes (_The Convert,_p. 111), "certain religious sentiments that I could not efface; certain religious beliefs or tendencies, of which I could not divest myself. I regarded them as a law of my nature, as natural to man, as the noblest part of our nature, and as such I cherished them; but as the expression in me of an objective world, I seldom pondered them. I found them universal, manifesting themselves, in some form, wherever man is found; but I received them, or supposed I received them, on the authority of humanity or human nature, and professed to hold no religion except that of humanity. I had become a believer in humanity, and put humanity in the place of God. The only God I recognized was the divine in man, the divinity of humanity, one alike with God and with man, which I supposed to be the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the mystery of Emmanuel, or God with us-God manifest in the flesh. There may be an unmanifested God, and certainly is; but the only God who exists for us is the God in man, the active and living principle of human nature.

"I regarded Jesus Christ as divine in the sense in which all men are divine, and human in the sense in which all men are human. I took him as my model man, and regarded him as a moral and social reformer, who sought, by teaching the truth under a religious envelope, and practising the highest and purest morality, to meliorate the earthly condition of mankind; but I saw nothing miraculous in his conception or birth, nothing supernatural in his person or character, in his life or doctrine. He came to redeem the world, as does every great and good man, and deserved to be held in universal honor and esteem as one who remained firm to the truth amid every trial, and finally died on the cross, a martyr to his love of mankind. As a social reformer, as one devoted to the progress and well-being of man in this world, I thought I might liken myself to him and call myself by his name. I called myself a Christian, not because I took him for my master, not because I believed all he believed or taught, but because, like him, I was laboring to introduce a new order of things, and to promote the happiness of my kind. I used the Bible as a good Protestant, took what could be accommodated to my purpose, and passed over the rest, as belonging to an age now happily outgrown. I followed the example of the carnal Jews, and gave an earthly sense to all the promises and prophecies of the Messias, and looked for my reward in this world."

The passages we have italicized in this extract may go to show how far Dr. Brownson himself was, at this period, from being able to give any but the evasive answer he actually did give to the searching philosophical questions put by his youthful admirer. But it is not easy, especially in the light of Isaac Hecker's subsequent experiences, to overestimate the influence which this new presentation of our Saviour had upon the development of his mind and character. For reasons which we have tried to indicate by a brief description of some of his life-long interior traits, the ordinary Protestant view, restricted and narrow, which represents Jesus Christ merely as the appointed though voluntary Victim of the Divine wrath against sin, had been pressed upon him prematurely. Now He was held up to him, and by a man who was in many ways superior to all other men the boy had met, as a great personality, altogether human, indeed, but still the most perfect specimen of the race; the supremely worshipful figure of all history, whose life had been given to the assertion of the dignity of man and the equality of mankind. That human nature is good and that men are brethren, said Dr. Brownson, was the thesis of Christ, taught throughout His life, sealed by His death. The Name which is above all names became thus in a new sense a watchword, and the Gospels a treasury for that social apostolate to which Isaac Hecker had already devoted himself with an earnestness which for some years made it seem religion enough for him.

So it has seemed before his time and since to many a benevolent dreamer. Though the rites of the humanitarian cult differ with its different priests, its creed retains everywhere and always its narrow identity. But that all men are good, or would be so save for the unequal pressure of social conditions on them, is a conclusion which does not follow from the single premise that human nature, inasmuch as it is a nature and from the hand of God, is essentially good. The world is flooded, just at present, with schemes for insuring the perfection and happiness of men by removing so far as possible all restraints upon their natural freedom; and whether this is to be accomplished with Tolsto?, by reducing wants to a minimum and abolishing money; or by establishing clubs for the promotion of culture and organizing a social army which shall destroy poverty by making money plenty, appears a mere matter of detail-at all events to dreamers and to novelists. But to men who are in hard earnest with themselves, men who "have not taken their souls in vain nor sworn deceitfully," either to their neighbor or about him, certain other truths concerning human nature besides that of its essential goodness are sure to make themselves evident, soon or late. And among these is that of its radical insufficiency to its own needs. It is a rational nature, and it seeks the Supreme Reason, if only for its own self-explication. It is a nature which, wherever found, is found in the attitude of adoration, and neither in the individual man nor in humanity at large is there any Divinity which responds to worship.

It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker's appreciation of this truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a tolerable approximation to the time. He went to Brook Farm in January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting with Dr. Brownson. It was by the advice of the latter that he made this first decisive break from his former life. From the time when their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social politics. We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason fastened up on the wall before him, so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor. Fichte and Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philosophers whose mother-tongue was likewise his own, and whose combined influence put him farther off than ever from the solution of that fundamental doubt which constantly grew more perplexing and more painful. We find him hiring a seat in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, where Orville Dewey was then preaching, and walking every Sunday a distance of three miles from the foot of Rutgers Street, "because he was a smart fellow, and I enjoyed listening to him. Did I believe in Unitarianism? No! I believed in nothing."

His active participation in local politics did not continue throughout all these years. His belief in candidates and parties as instruments to be relied on for social purification received a final blow very early-possibly before he was entitled to cast a vote. The Workingmen had made a strong ticket one year, and there seemed every probability of their carrying it. But on the eve of the election half of their candidates sold out to one of the opposing parties. What other results this treachery may have had is a question which, fortunately, does not concern us, but it dispelled one of the strongest of Isaac Hecker's youthful illusions. He continued, nevertheless, to prove the sincerity with which his views on social questions were held, by doing all that lay in his power to better the condition of the men in the employment of his brothers and himself. After he passed his majority his interest in the business declined rapidly, and it is impossible to doubt that one of the chief reasons why it did so is to be sought in his changing convictions as to the manner in which business in general should be carried on.

Although in accepting Christ as his master and model he had as yet no belief in Him as more than the most perfect of human beings, yet, even so, Isaac Hecker's sincerity and simplicity were too great to permit him to follow his leader at a purely conventional distance. "Do you know," he said long afterwards, "the thought that first loosened me from the life I led? How can I love my fellow-men and yet get rich by the sweat of their brows? I couldn't do it. You are not a Christian, and can't call yourself one, I said to myself, if you do that. The heathenish selfishness of business competition started me away from the world."

If he had received a Catholic training, Isaac Hecker would soon have recognized that he was being drawn toward the practice of that counsel of perfection which St. Paul embodies to St. Timothy in the words: "Having food and wherewith to be covered, with these we are content."* Could he have sought at this time the advice of one familiar with internal ways, he must have been cautioned against that first error to which those so drawn are liable, of supposing that this call is common and imperative, and can never fail to be heard without some more or less wilful closing of the ears. Though the Hecker brothers were, and ever continued to be, men of the highest business integrity, and though there existed between them a cordial affection, which was intensified to an extraordinary degree in the case of George and Isaac, yet the unfitness of the latter for ordinary trade grew increasingly evident, and to himself painfully so. The truth is, that his ideas of conducting business would have led to the distribution of profits rather than to their accumulation. If he could make the bake-house and the shop into a school for the attainment of an ideal that had begun to hover, half-veiled, in the air above him, he saw his way to staying where he was; but not otherwise.

[* I Timothy 6:8.]

In the autumn of 1842 there came upon him certain singular intensifications of this disquiet with himself and his surroundings. In the journal begun the following spring, he so frequently and so explicitly refers to these occurrences, now speaking of them as "dreams which had a great effect upon my character"; and again, specializing and fully describing one, as something not dreamed, but seen when awake, "which left an indelible impression my mind," weaning it at once and for ever from all possibility of natural love and marriage, that the integrity of any narrative of his life would demand some recognition of them. His own comment, in the diary, will not be without interest and value, both as bearing on much that follows, and as containing all that need be said in explanation of the present reference to such experiences:

"April 24, 1843.-. . . How can I doubt these things? Say what may be said, still they have to me a reality, a practical good bearing on my life. They are impressive instructors, whose teachings are given in such a real manner that they influence me whether I would or not. Real pictures of the future, as actual, nay, more so than my present activity. If I should not follow them I am altogether to blame. I can have no such adviser upon earth; none could impress me so strongly, with such peculiar effect, and at the precise time most needed. Where my natural strength is not enough, I find there comes foreign aid to my assistance. Is the Lord instructing me for anything? I had, six months ago, three or more dreams which had a very great effect upon my character; they changed it. They were the embodiment of my present in a great degree. Last evening's was a warning embodiment of a false activity and its consequence, which will preserve me, under God's assistance, from falling. . . . I see by it where I am; it has made me purer."

In addition to these peculiar visitations, and very probably in consequence of them, Isaac's inward anxieties culminated in prolonged fits of nervous depression, and at last in repeated attacks of illness which baffled the medical skill called to his assistance. Towards Christmas he went to Chelsea to visit Brownson, to whom he partially revealed the state of obscurity and distress in which he found himself. Brownson, who had been one of the original promoters of the experiment in practical sociology at West Roxbury, advised a residence at Brook Farm as likely to afford the young man the leisure and opportunities for study which he needed in order to come to a full understanding with himself. He wrote to George Ripley in his behalf and later undertook to reconcile the Hecker household with Isaac's determination to go thither.

It was during his stay at Chelsea that Isaac first began plainly to acquaint his family with the fact that his departure meant something more important than the moderately prolonged change of scene and circumstances which they had recognized as essential to his health. We shall make abundant extracts from the letters which begin at this date, convinced that his own words will not only afford the best evidence of the strength of the interior pressure on him, but will show also its unique and constant bent.

Our purpose is to show, in the most explicit manner possible, first, how irresistibly he was impelled toward the celibate life and the practice of poverty; and second, that in yielding to this impulse, he was also drawn away from his former view of our Saviour, as simply the perfect man, to the full acceptance of the supernatural truth that He is the Incarnate God.

It is at this period of Father Hecker's life that we first meet with a positive interference of an extraordinary kind in the plans and purposes of his life. Many men who have outlived them, and settled down into respectable but in nowise notable members of society, have felt vague longings and indefinite aspirations toward a good beyond nature during the "Storm and Stress" period of their youth. The record of their mental struggles gets into literature with comparative frequency, and sometimes becomes famous. It has always a certain value, if merely as contributing to psychological science; but in any particular instance is of passing interest only, unless it can be shown to have been instrumental in shaping the subsequent career. The latter was the case with Father Hecker. The extraordinary influences already mentioned continued to dominate his intelligence and his will, sometimes with, oftener without, explicit assignment of any cause. It is plain enough that, up to the time when they began, he had looked forward to such a future of domestic happiness as honest young fellows in his position commonly desire. "He was the life of the family circle," says one who knew the Hecker household intimately; "he loved his people, and was loved by them with great intensity, and his going away must have been most painful to him as well as to them."

On this point the memoranda, so often to be referred to, contain some words of his own to the same purport. They were spoken early in 1882: "You know I had to leave my business-a good business it was getting to be, too. I tell you, it was agony to give everything up-friends, prospects in life and old associates; things for which by nature I had a very strong attachment. But I could not help it; I was driven from it. I wanted something more; something I had not been able to find. Yet I did not know what I wanted. I was simply in torment."

The truth is that, while he had always cherished ideals higher than are usual, still they were not such as need set him apart from the common life of men. But now he became suddenly averse from certain pursuits and pleasures, not only good in themselves, but consonant to his previous dispositions. The road to wealth lay open before him, but his feet refused to tread it. He was invincibly drawn to poverty, solitude, sacrifice; modes of life from which he shrank by nature, and which led to no goal that he could see or understand. There is no name so descriptive of such impulses as supernatural.

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