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 Tolstoi, 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.





CHAPTER IV

LED BY THE SPIRIT

THE earliest of the letters so fortunately preserved by the affection of Isaac Hecker's kindred is addressed to his mother, from Chelsea, and bears date December 24, 1842. After giving some details of his arrival, and of the kindly manner in which he had been received, he writes:*

[* We have corrected some slight errors of orthography and punctuation in these early letters. They were of the sort to be expected from a self-trained youth, as yet little used to the written expression of his thoughts. They soon disappear almost entirely.]

"But as regards your advice to write my thoughts to you, that is an impossibility which I cannot govern or control. This ought not to be so, but so it is. Am I to blame? I feel not. And what if I could tell? It might be only a deep dissatisfaction which could not be made intelligible, or at least not be felt as it is felt by me. Let us be untroubled about it. A little time, and, I hope, all will pass away, and I be the same as usual. We all differ a little, at least in our characters; hence there is nothing surprising if our experiences should differ. I feel that a little time will be my best remedy, which I trust we will await without much anxiety. Resignation is taught when we cannot help ourselves. Take nothing I have said discouragingly. Turn fears into hopes and doubts into faith, and we shall be better if not happier. There is no use in allowing our doubts and fears to control us; by fostering them we increase them, and we want all our time for something better and higher."

Two days later he writes more fully, and this letter we shall give almost entire:

"Chelsea, December 26, 1842.—BROTHERS: I want to write to you, but what is the use of scrawling on paper if I write what I do not feel—intend? It is worse than not writing. And yet why I should be backward I don't know. The change that I have undergone has been so rapid and of such a kind; that may be the reason. I feel that as I now am perhaps you cannot understand me. I am afraid lest your conduct would be such that under present circumstances I could not stand under it. Do not misunderstand me. If I have ever appreciated anything in my life, it is the favor and indulgent treatment you have shown me in our business. I know that I have never done an equal share in the work which was for us all to do. I have always been conscious of this. I hope you will receive this as it is written, for I am open. Daily am I losing that disposition which was attributed to me of self-approval. . . . There is no reason why I should distrust your dispositions toward me but my own feelings, and it is these that have kept me back, that and the change my mind is undergoing. This is so continuous, and at the same time so firmly fixed, that I am unable to keep back any longer. I had hopes that my former life would return, so that I would be able to go on as usual, although this tendency has always been growing in me. But I find more and more that it is not possible. I would go back if I could, but the impossibility of that I cannot express. To continue as I am now would keep me constantly in an unsettled state of health, especially as my future appears to be opening before me with clearness. I say sincerely that I have lost all but this one thing, and how shall I speak it? My mind has lost all disposition to business; my hopes, life, existence, are all in another direction. No one knows how I tried to exert myself to work, or the cause of my inability. I was conscious of the cause, but as it was supposed to be a physical one, the reason of it was sought for, but to no purpose. In the same circumstances now I should be worse. When I say my mind cannot be occupied as formerly, do not attribute it to my wishes. This is what I fear; it makes me almost despair, makes me feel that I would rather die than live under such thoughts. I never could be happy if you thought so. My future will be my only evidence. My experience, which is now my own evidence, I cannot give you. To keep company with females—you know what I mean—I have no desire. I have no thought of marrying, and I feel an aversion to company for such an end. In my whole life I have never felt less inclined to it. If my disposition ran that way, marrying might lead me back to my old life, but oh! that is impossible. To give up, as I have to do, a life which has often been my highest aim and hope, is done with a sense of responsibility I never imagined before. This, I am conscious, is no light thought. It lies deeper than myself, and I have not the power to control it. I do not write this with ease; it is done in tears, and I have opened my mind as I have not done before. How all this will end I know not, but cannot but trust God. It is not my will but my destiny, which will not be one of ease and pleasure, but one which I contemplate as a perpetual sacrifice of my past hopes, though of a communion I had never felt. Can I adopt a course of life to increase and fulfil my present life? I am unable to give this decision singly. You will, I hope, accept this letter in the spirit I have written it. I speak to you in a sense I never have spoken to you before. In this letter I have opened as far as I could my inmost life. My heart is full and I would say a great deal more. Truly, a new life has opened to me, and to turn backward would be death. Not suddenly has it undergone this change, but it has come to that crisis where my decision must be made; hence am I forced to write this letter. For its answer I shall wait with intense anxiety. Hoping you will write soon, my love to all.—ISAAC."

The next letter, though addressed to his brothers, was apparently intended for the whole family, and begins with more than Isaac's customary abruptness:

"Chelsea, December 28, 1842.—I will open my mind so that you can have the materials to judge from as well as myself. I feel unable to the task of judging alone correctly. I have given an account of my state of mind in my former letter, but will add that what is there said describes a permanent state, not a momentary excitement. You may think that in a little time this would pass away, and I would be able to resume my former life; or, at least, you could so adapt things at home that although I should not precisely occupy myself as then, still it might be so arranged as to give me that which I feel necessary in order to live somewhat contented.

"I am sorry to say I can in no way conceive such an arrangement of things at home. Why? I hate to say it, yet we might as well come to an understanding. I have grown out of the life which can be received through the accustomed channels of the circle that was around me. I am subject to thoughts and feelings which the others had no interest in; hence they could not be expressed. There can be no need to tell you this—you all must have seen it. How can I stop my life from flowing on? You must see the case I stand in. Do not think I have less of the feelings of a brother and a son. My heart never was closer, not so close as it is now to yours. . . .

"Do not think this is imagination; in this I have had too much experience. The life that was in me had none to commune with, and I felt it was consuming me. I tried to express this in different ways obscurely, but it appeared singular and no one understood me. This was the cause of my wishing to go away, hoping I would either get clear of it or something might turn up, I knew not what. One course was advised by the doctor, and you all thought as he did—that was to keep company with the intention of getting married. This was not the communion that I wanted or that was congenial to my life. Marrying would not, I am convinced, have had any permanent effect. It was not that which controlled me, then or now. It is altogether different; it is a life in me which requires altogether different circumstances to live it. This is no dream; or, if it is, then have I never had such reality. . . .

"When I wrote last it struck me I might secure what I need at Brook Farm, but that would depend greatly upon how you answer my letter. If you do as perhaps you may, I will go and see whether I could be satisfied and how it is, and let you know.

"So far had I written when your letter came. . . . You appear to ask this question: What object have you in contemplation? None further than to live a life agreeable to the mind I have, which I feel under a necessity to do."

"Chelsea, December 30, 1842.—TO MOTHER: I am sorry to hear that you feel worried. My health is good, I eat and sleep well. That my mind is not settled, or as it used to be, is no reason to be troubled, for I hope it is not changing for the worse, and I look forward to brighter days than we have seen in those that are gone. I was conscious my last letter was not written in a manner to give you ease; but to break those old habits of our accustomed communion was to me a serious task, and done under a sense of duty, to let you know the cause of the disease I was supposed to labor under. That is past now, and I hope we shall understand each other, and that our future will be smooth and easy. The ice has been broken. That caused me some pain but no regret, and instead of feeling sorrow, you will, I hope, be contented that I should continue the path that will make me better."

Concerning Isaac Hecker's residence at Brook Farm, which was begun about the middle of the following January, we shall have more to say hereafter. At present our concern is chiefly with those explanations of his conduct and motives which the anxieties of his family continually forced him to attempt. There is, however, among the papers belonging to this period one which, although found with the letters, was evidently so included by mistake, and at some later date. It is an outpouring still more intimate than he was able to make for the enlightenment of others, and is the first vestige of a diary which has been found. But it seems plain that his longing for what he continually calls "communion," and the effort to divine the will of Providence in his regard, must frequently have urged him to that introspective self-contemplation so common to natures like his before their time for action has arrived. We make some brief extracts from this document which illustrates, still more plainly than any of the letters, the fact that the interior pressure to which he was subjected had for its uniform tendency and result his vivid realization of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It is written in a fine, close hand on a sheet of letter-paper, which it entirely covers, and bears date January 10, 1843:

"Could I but reveal myself unto myself! What shall I say? Is life dear to me? No. Are my friends dear to me? I could suffer and die for them, if need were, but yet I have none of the old attachment for them. I would clasp all to my heart, love all for their humanity, but not as relatives or individuals. . . . Lord, if I am to be anything, I am, of all, most unfit for the task. What shall I do? Whom shall I cry to but Him who has given me life and planted this spirit in me? Unto Thee, then, do I cry from the depths of my soul for light to suffer. If there is anything for me to do, why this darkness all around me? I ask not to be happy. I will forego, as I always had a presentiment I must do, all hopes which young men of my age are prone to picture in their minds. If only I could have a ray of light on my present condition! O Lord! open my eyes to see the path Thou wouldst have me walk in. . . .

"Jan. 11.—True life is one continuous prayer, one unceasing aspiration after the holy. I have no conception of a life insensible to that which is not above itself lofty. I would not take it on myself to say I have been 'born again,' but I know that I have passed from death to life. Things below have no hold upon me further than as they lead to things above. It is not a moral restraint that I have over myself, but it is such a change, a conversion of my whole being, that I have no need of restraint. Temptations still beset me—not sensual, but of a kind which seek to make me untrue to my life. If I am not on my guard I become cold. May I always be humble, meek, prayerful, open to all men. Light, love, and life God is always giving, but we turn our backs and will not receive. . . .

"Who can measure the depths of Christ's suffering—alone in the world, having that which would give life everlasting, a heaven, to those who would receive it, and yet despised, spit upon, rejected of men! Oh! how sweet must it have been to His soul when He found even one who would accept a portion of that precious gift which He came to the world to bestow! Well could He say, 'Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.' He would give them life, but they would not receive. He would save them, but they rejected Him. He loved them, and they despised Him. Alas! who has measured even in a small degree the love of Christ and yet denied His superiority over man! His love, goodness, mercy are unbounded. O Lord! may I daily come into closer communion with Thy Son, Jesus Christ."

On the 22d of February he addresses both of his parents in reply to a letter sent by his brother John, detailing some of their troubles on this head. He writes:

"It is as great a difficulty for me to reconcile my being here with my sense of duty towards you. . . . Since I must speak, let me tell you that I have at present no disposition to return. Neither are the circumstances that surround me now those which will give me contentment; but I feel that I am here as a temporary place, and that by spring something will turn up which I hope will be for the happiness of us all. What it will be I have not the least idea of now. It is as impossible for me to give you an explanation of that which has led me of late as it would be for a stranger. All before me is dark, even as that is which leads me now and has led me before. One sentiment I have which I feel I cannot impart to you. It is that I am controlled. Formerly I could act from intention, but now I have no future to design, nothing in prospect, and my present action is from a present cause, not from any past. Hence it is that while my action may appear to others as designed, to me it is unlooked-for and unaccountable. I do not expect that others can feel this as I do. I am tossed about in a sea without a rudder. What drives me onward, and where I shall be driven, is to me unknown. My past life seems to me like that of another person, and my present is like a dream. Where am I? I know not. I have no power over my present, I do not even know what it is. Whom can I find like myself, whom can I speak to that will understand me?

"This makes me still, lonely; and I cannot wish myself out of this state. I have no will to do that—not that I have any desire to. All I can say is that I am in it. What would be the effect of necessity on me, I know not, whether it would lead me back or lead me on. My feeling of duty towards you is a continual weight upon me which I cannot throw off—it is best, perhaps, that I cannot. All appears to me as a seeming, not a reality. Nothing touches that life in me which is seeking that which I know not."

TO GEORGE HECKER.—"Brook Farm, March 6, 1843.—What was the reason of my going, or what made me go? The reason I am not able to tell. But what I felt was a dark, irresistible influence upon me that led me away from home. What it was I know not. What keeps me here I cannot tell. It is only when I struggle against it that a spell comes over me. If I give up to it, nothing is the matter with me. But when I look to my past, my duty toward you all, and consider what this may lead me to, and then attempt to return, I get into a state which I cannot speak of . . .

"By attempt to return I mean an attempt to return to my old life, for so I have to call it—that is, to get clear of this influence. And yet I have no will to will against it. I do not desire it, or its mode of living, and I am opposed to its tendency.

"What bearing this has upon the question of my coming home you will perceive. As soon as I can come, I will. If I should do so now, it would throw me back to the place from which I started. Is this fancy on my part? All I can say is that if so the last nine or ten months of my life have been a fancy which is too deep for me to control."

After paying his family a visit in April, he writes to them on his return:

"Brook Farm, April 14, 1843.—Here I am alone in my room once more. I feel settled, and begin to live again, separated from everything but my studies and thoughts, and the feeling of gratitude toward you all for treating me so much better than I am aware of ever having treated you. May I ever keep this sense of obligation and indebtedness. My prayer is, that the life I have been led to live these few months back may prove to the advantage of us all in the end. I sometimes feel guilty because I did not attempt again to try and labor with you. But the power that kept me back, its hold upon me, its strength over me, all that I am unable to communicate, makes my situation appear strange to others, and to myself irreconcilable with my former state. Still, I trust that, in a short period, all things will take their peaceful and orderly course."

TO GEORGE HECKER.—"Brook Farm, May 12, 1843.—How much nearer to you I feel on account of your good letter you cannot estimate—nearer than when we slept in the same bed. Nearness of body is no evidence of the distance between souls, for I imagine Christ loved His mother very tenderly when He said, 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?'"

"I have felt, time and again, that either I would have to give up the life that was struggling in me, or withdraw from business in the way that we pursue it. This I had long felt, before the period came which suddenly threw me involuntarily out of it. Here I am, living in the present, without a why or a wherefore, trusting that something will shape my course intelligibly. I am completely without object. And when occasionally I emerge, if I may so speak, into actual life, I feel that I have dissipated time. A sense of guilt accompanies that of pleasure, and I return inwardly into a deeper, intenser life, breaking those tender roots which held me fast for a short period to the outward. In study only do I enter with wholeness; nothing else appears to take hold of my life." . . . "I am staying here, intentionally, for a short period. When the time arrives" (for leaving) "heaven knows what I may do. I am now perfectly dumb before it. Perhaps I may return and enter into business with more perseverance and industry than before; perhaps I may stay here; it may be that I shall be led elsewhere. But there is no utility in speculating on the future. If we lived as we should, we would feel that we lived in the presence of God, without past or future, having a full consciousness of existence, living the 'eternal life.' . . .

"George, do not get too engrossed with outward business. Rather neglect a part of it for that which is immortal in its life, incomparable in its fulness. It is a deep, important truth: 'Seek first the kingdom of God, and then all things will be added.' In having nothing we have all."

TO MRS. HECKER.—"Brook Farm, May 16, 1843.—DEAR MOTHER: You will not take it unkind, my not writing to you before? I am sure you will not, for you know what I am. Daily I feel more and more indebted to you for my life, especially when I feel happy and good. How can I repay you? As you, no doubt, would wish me to-by becoming better and living as you have desired and prayed that I should, which I trust, by Divine assistance, I may.

"Mother, I cannot express the depth of gratitude I feel toward you for the tender care and loving discipline with which you brought me up to manhood. Without it, oh! what might I not have been? The good that I have, under God, I am conscious that I am greatly indebted to thee for; at times I feel that it is thou acting in me, and that there is nothing that can ever separate us. A bond which is as eternal as our immortality, our life, binds us together and cannot be broken.

"Mother, that I should be away from home at present no doubt makes you sorrowful often, and you wish me back. Let me tell you how it is with me. The life which surrounds me in New York oppresses me, contracts my feelings, and abridges my liberty. Business, as it is now pursued, is a burden upon my spiritual life, and all its influence hurtful to the growth of a better life. This I have felt for a long time, and feel it now more intensely than before. And the society I had there was not such as benefited me. My life was not increased by theirs, and I was gradually ceasing to be. I was lonely, friendless, and without object in this world, while at the same time I was conscious of a greater degree of activity of mind in another direction. These causes still remain. . . .

". . . I feel fully conscious of the importance of making any change in my life at my present age—giving up those advantages which so many desire; as well as the necessity of being considerate, prudent, and slow to decide. I am aware that my future state here, and hence hereafter, will greatly depend upon the steps I now take, and therefore I would do nothing unadvised or hastily. I would not sacrifice eternal for worldly life. At present I wish to live a true life, desiring nothing external, seeing that things external cannot procure those things for and in which I live. I do not renounce things, but feel no inclination for them. All is indifferent to me—poverty or riches, life or death. I am loosed. But do not on this account think I am sorrowful; nay, for I have nothing to sorrow for. Is there no bright hope at a distance which cheers me onward and beckons me to speed? I dare not say. Sometimes I feel so—it is the unutterable. Yet I remain contented to be without spring or autumn, youth or age. One tie has been loosened after another; the dreams of my youth have passed away silently, and the visions of the future I then beheld have vanished. I feel awakened as from a dream, and like a shadow has my past gone by. With the verse at the bottom of the picture you gave me, I can say:

"'Oh! days that once I used to prize, Are ye forever gone? The veil is taken from my eyes, And now I stand alone.'

"But I would not recall those by-gone days, nor do I stand alone. No! Out from this life will spring a higher world, of which the past was but a weak, faint shadow."





CHAPTER V

AT BROOK FARM

THE famous though short-lived community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Isaac Hecker made his first trial of the common life, was started in the spring of 1841 by George Ripley and his wife, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John S. Dwight, George P. Bradford, Sarah Sterns, a niece of George Ripley's, Marianne Ripley, his sister, and four or five others whose names we do not know. In September of the same year they were joined by Charles A. Dana, now of the New York Sun. Hawthorne's residence at the Farm, commemorated in the Blithedale Romance, had terminated before Mr. Dana's began. The Curtis brothers, Burrill and George William, were there when Isaac Hecker came. Emerson was an occasional visitor; so was Margaret Fuller. Bronson Alcott, then cogitating his own ephemeral experiment at Fruitlands, sometimes descended on the gay community and was doubtless "Orphic" at his leisure. The association was the outcome of many discussions which had taken place at Mr. Ripley's house in Boston during the winter of 1840-41. Among the prominent Bostonians who took part in these informal talks were Theodore Parker, Adin Ballou, Samuel Robbins, John S. Dwight, Warren Burton, and Orestes Brownson. Each of these men, and, if we do not mistake, George Ripley also, presided at the time over some religious body. Mr. Ballou, who was a Universalist minister of much local renown, was, perhaps, the only exception to the prevailing Unitarian complexion of the assembly.

The object of their discussions seems to have been, in a general way, the necessity for some social reform which should go to the root of the commercial spirit and the contempt for certain kinds of labor so widely prevalent; and, in a special way, the feasibility of establishing at once, on however small a scale, a co-operative experiment in family life, having for its ulterior aim the reorganization of society on a less selfish basis. They probably considered that, a beginning once made by people of their stamp, the influence of their example would work as a quickening leaven. They hoped to be the mustard-seed which, planted in a congenial soil, would grow into a tree in whose branches all the birds of the air might dwell. It was the initial misfortune of the Brook-Farmers to establish themselves on a picturesque but gravelly and uncongenial soil, whose poverty went very far toward compassing the collapse of their undertaking.

Not all of the ministers whose names have just been mentioned were of one mind, either as to the special evils to be counteracted or the remedies which might be tentatively applied. Three different associations took their rise from among this handful of earnest seekers after better social methods. Mr. Ballou, who headed one of these, believed that unity and cohesion could be most surely obtained by a frank avowal of beliefs, aims, and practices, to which all present and future associates would be expected to conform. Mrs. Kirby, whose interesting volume* we have already quoted, says that the platform of this party bound them to abolitionism, anti-orthodoxy, women's rights, total abstinence, and opposition to war. They established themselves at Hopedale, Massachusetts, where, so far as our knowledge goes, some vestige of them may still remain, though the analogies and probabilities are all against such a survival. A second band of "come-outers," as people used to be called in that day and region, when they abandoned the common road for reasons not obviously compulsory, went to Northampton in the same State, and from there into corporate obscurity.

[* Years of Experience. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1887.]

Mr. Ripley's scheme was more elastic, and if the money basis of the association had been more solid, there seems no reason on the face of things why this community at Brook Farm might not have enjoyed a much longer lease of life. It seems to have left a most pleasant memory in the minds of all who were ever members of it. In matters of belief and of opinion no hard-and-fast lines were drawn at any point. In matters of conduct, the morality of self-respecting New-Englanders who were at a farther remove from Puritanic creeds than from Puritanic discipline, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of social decorum. Of the earliest additions to the co-operative household, a sprinkling were already Catholic; others, including the wife and the niece of the founder, afterwards became so. Some attended orthodox Protestant churches; the majority were probably Unitarians. Discussion on all subjects appears to have been free, frank, and good-tempered.

There was no attempt made at any communism except that of intellectual and social gifts and privileges. There was a common table, and Mrs. Kirby has given us some attractive glimpses of the good feeling, and kindly gayety, and practical observance of the precept to "bear one another's burdens" which came into play around it. For many months, as no one could endure to have his equal serve him, and all were equals, there was a constant getting up and down at table so that each might help himself. Afterwards, when decline had already set in, so far as the material basis of the undertaking was concerned, and those who had its success most at heart had begun to study Fourier for fruitful suggestions, the first practical hint from that quarter resulted in Mr. Dana's organizing "a group of servitors." These, writes Mrs. Kirby,* comprised "four of the most elegant youths at the community—the son of a Louisiana planter, a young Spanish hidalgo, a rudimentary Free-soiler from Hingham, and, if I remember rightly, Edward Barlow (the brother of Francis). These, with one accord, elected as chief their handsome and beloved teacher. It is hardly necessary to observe that the business was henceforth attended to with such courtly grace and such promptness that the new regime was applauded by every one, although it did appear at first as if we were all engaged in acting a play. The group, with their admired chief, took dinner, which had been kept warm for them, afterwards, and were themselves waited upon with the utmost consideration, but I confess I never could get accustomed to the new regulation."

[* Years of Experience, pp. 178, 179.]

The watchword of the place was fraternity, not communism. People took up residence at Brook Farm on different terms. Some paid a stipulated board, and thus freed themselves from any obligatory share in either domestic or out-door labor. Others contributed smaller sums and worked out the balance. Some gave labor only, as was the case with Mrs. Kirby, then Georgiana Bruce, an English girl of strong character. She says she agreed to work eight hours a day for her board and instruction in any branches of study which she elected to pursue. As an illustration of the actual poverty to which the community were soon reduced, and, moreover, of the low money value they set on domestic labor, we give another characteristic passage from her book. The price of full board, as we learn from a bill sent by Mr. Ripley to Isaac Hecker after the latter's final departure from the Farm, was five dollars and fifty cents a week:

"When a year had elapsed I found my purse empty and my wardrobe much the worse for wear. As I was known to be heartily interested in the new movement, my case was taken under consideration, and, with the understanding that I was to add two more hours to my working day, I was admitted as bona-fide member of the association (which included only a dozen), and was allowed to draw on the treasury for my very moderate necessities. Forty dollars a year would cover these, writing-paper and postage included. The last item was no unimportant one, as each letter cost from ten to fifty cents, and money counted for more then than now.

"I should explain that for the whole of one winter there remained but two bonnets fit for city eyes among six of us. But the best of these was forced on whomever was going to town. As for best dresses, a twenty-five cent delaine was held to be gorgeous apparel. The gentlemen had found it desirable to adopt a tunic in place of the more expensive, old-world coat."*

[* Years of Experience, p. 132.]

The income of the association was derived from various sources other than the prices paid for board. There was a school for young children, presided over by Mrs. Ripley, assisted by various pupil-teachers, who thus partially recompensed the community for their own support. Fruit, milk, and vegetables, when there were any to spare, were sent to the Boston markets. Now and then some benevolent philanthropist with means would make a donation. No one who entered was expected to contribute his whole income to the general purse, unless such income would not more than cover the actual expense incurred for him. When Isaac Hecker went to West Roxbury the establishment included seventy inmates, who were distributed in several buildings bearing such poetical names as the Hive, the Eyrie, the Nest, and so on. The number rose to ninety or a hundred before he left them, but the additions seem occasionally to have been in the nature of subtractions also, taking away more of the cultivation, refinement, and general good feeling which had been the distinguishing character of the place, than they added by their money or their labor.

Isaac Hecker was never an actual member of that inner community of whose aspirations and convictions the Farm was intended as an embodiment. He entered at first as a partial boarder, paying four dollars a week, and undertaking also the bread-making, which until then had been very badly done, as he writes to his mother. It should be understood that whatever was received from any inmate, either in money or labor, was accepted not as a mere return for food and shelter, but as an equivalent for such instruction as could be imparted by any other member of the collective family. And there were many competent and brilliant men and women there, whose attainments not only qualified them amply for the tasks they then assumed, but have since made them prominent in American letters and journalism. Mr. Ripley lectured on modern philosophy to all who desired an acquaintance with Spinoza, Kant, Cousin, and their compeers. George P. Bradford was a thorough classical scholar. Charles A. Dana, then fresh from Harvard, was an enthusiast for German literature, and successful in imparting both knowledge and enthusiasm to his pupils. There were classes in almost everything that any one cared to study. French and music, as we learn from one of Isaac's letters home, were what he set himself to at the first. The latter was taught by so accomplished a master as John S. Dwight, who conducted weekly singing-schools for both children and adults.

To what other studies Isaac may have applied himself we hardly know. It will be noticed that Mr. George William Curtis, in the kindly reminiscences which he permits us to embody in this chapter, says that he does not remember him as "especially studious." The remark tallies with the impression we have gathered from the journal kept while he was there. His mind was introverted. Philosophical questions, then as always, interested him profoundly, but only in so far as they led to practical results. It might be truer to say that philosophy was at no time more than the handmaid of theology to him. At this period he was in the thick of his struggle to attain certainty with regard to the nature and extent of the Christian revelation, and what he sought at Brook Farm was the leisure and quiet and opportunity for solitude which could not be his at home. "Lead me into Thy holy Church, which I now am seeking," he writes as the final petition of the prayer with which the first bulky volume of his diary opens. With the burden of that search upon him, it was not possible for such a nature as his to plunge with the unreserve which is the condition of success into any study which had no direct reference to it. We find him complaining at frequent intervals that he cannot give his studies the attention they demand. Nor were his labors as the community baker of long continuance. They left him too little time at his own disposal, and in a short time he became a full boarder, and occupied himself only as his inclinations directed.

It may occur to some of our readers to wonder why a man like Brownson, who was then fast nearing the certainty he afterwards attained, should have sent a youth like Isaac Hecker to Brook Farm. It must be remembered that Brownson's road to the Church was not so direct as that of his young disciple, nor so entirely free in all its stages from self-crippling considerations. As we shall presently see, by an abstract of one of his sermons, preached in the spring of 1843, which was made by Isaac Hecker at the time, Brownson thought it possible to hold all Catholic truth and yet defer entering the Church until she should so far abate her claims as to form a friendly alliance with orthodox Protestantism on terms not too distasteful to the latter. He was not yet willing to depart alone, and hoped by waiting to take others with him, and he was neither ready to renounce wholly his private views, nor to counsel such a step to young Hecker. He was in harmony, moreover, with the tolerant and liberal tendency which influenced the leading spirits at Brook Farm. Although he never became one of the community, he had sent his son Orestes there as a pupil, and was a frequent visitor himself. Their aims, as expressed in a passage which we subjoin from The Dial of January, 1842, were assuredly such as would approve themselves to persons who fully accepted what they believed to be the social teaching of our Lord, but who had not attained to any true conception of the Divine authority which clothes that teaching:

"Whoever is satisfied with society as it is; whose sense of justice is not wounded by its common action, institutions, spirit of commerce, has no business with this community; neither has any one who is willing to have other men (needing more time for intellectual cultivation than himself) give their best hours and strength to bodily labor to secure himself immunity therefrom. . . . Everything can be said of it, in a degree, which Christ said of His kingdom, and therefore it is believed that in some measure it does embody His idea. For its Gate of Entrance is strait and narrow. It is, literally, a pearl hidden in a field. Those only who are willing to lose their life for its sake shall find it. . . . Those who have not the faith that the principles of Christ's kingdom are applicable to this world, will smile at it as a visionary attempt."

Brook Farm has an interest for Catholics because, in the order of guileless nature, it was the preamble of that common life which Isaac Hecker afterwards enjoyed in its supernatural realization in the Church. It was a protest against that selfishness of the individual which is highly accentuated in a large class of New-Englanders, and prodigiously developed in the economical conditions of modern society. Against these Isaac had revolted in New York; at Brook Farm he hoped to find their remedy. And in fact the gentle reformers, as we may call these West Roxbury adventurers into the unexplored regions of the common life, were worthy of their task though not equal to it. There is no doubt that in small numbers and with a partial surrender of individual prerogatives, well-meaning men and women may taste many of the good things and be able to bear some of the hardships of the common life. But to compass in permanent form its aspirations in this direction, as in many others, nature is incompetent. The terrible if wonderful success of Sparta is what can be attained, and tells at what cost. The economy of the bee-hive, which kills or drives away its superfluous members, and the polity of Sparta, which put the cripples and the aged to death, are essential to permanent success in the venture of communism in the natural order. "Sweetness and light" are enjoyed by the few only at the sacrifice of the unwholesome and burdensome members of the hive.

Brook Farm, however, was not conceived in any spirit of cruelty or of contempt of the weaker members of humanity; the very contrary was the case. Sin and feebleness were capable, thought its founders, of elimination by the force of natural virtue. The men and women who gathered there in its first years were noble of their kind; and their kind, now much less frequently met with, was the finest product of natural manhood. Of the channels of information which reach us from Brook Farm, and we believe we have had access to them all, none contains the slightest evidence of sensuality, the least trace of the selfishness of the world, or even any sign of the extravagances of spiritual pride. There is, on the other hand, a full acknowledgment of the ordinary failings of unpretentious good people. Nor do we mean to say that they were purely in the natural order—who can be said to be that? They were the descendants of the baptized Puritans whose religious fervor had been for generations at white heat. They had, indeed, cut the root, but the sap of Christian principle still lingered in the trunk and branches and brought forth fruit which was supernatural, though destined never to ripen.

Christ was the model of the Brook-Farmers, as He had become that of Isaac Hecker. They did not know Him as well as they knew His doctrine. They knew better what He said than why He said it, and that defect obscured His meaning and mystified their understandings. That all men were brethren was the result of their study of humanity under what they conceived to be His leadership; that all labor is honorable, and entitled to equal remuneration, was their solution of the social problem. While any man was superfluously rich, they maintained, no man should be miserably poor. They were reaching after what the best spirits of the human race were then and now longing for, and they succeeded as well as any can who employ only the selvage of the Christian garment to protect themselves against the rigors of nature. Saint-Simon was a far less worthy man than George Ripley, but he failed no more signally. Frederic Ozanam, whose ambition was limited in its scope by his appreciation of both nature and the supernatural, succeeded in establishing a measure of true fraternity between rich and poor throughout the Catholic world.

There can be no manner of doubt that although Father Hecker in after life could good-naturedly smile at the singularities of Brook Farm, what he saw and was taught there had a strong and permanent effect on his character. It is little to say that the influence was refining to him, for he was refined by nature. But he gained what was to him a constant corrective of any tendency to man-hatred in all its degrees, not needed by himself to be sure, but always needed in his dealing with others. It gave to a naturally trustful disposition the vim and vigor of an apostolate for a cheerful view of human nature. It was a characteristic trait of his to expect good results from reliance on human virtue, and his whole success as a persuades of men was largely to be explained by the subtle flattery of this trustful attitude towards them. At Brook Farm the mind of Isaac Hecker was eagerly looking for instruction. It failed to get even a little clear light on the more perplexing problems of life, but it got something better—the object-lesson of good men and women struggling nobly and unselfishly for laudable ends. Brook Farm was an attempt to remove obstructions from the pathway of human progress, taking that word in the natural sense.

Even afterwards, when he had known human destiny in its perfect supernatural and natural forms, and when the means to compass it were in his possession and plainly competent for success, his memory reproduced the scenes and persons of Brook Farm in an atmosphere of affection and admiration, though not unmingled with amusement. He used not infrequently to quote words heard there, and cite examples of things done there, as lessons of wisdom not only for the philosopher but also for the ascetic. He was there equipped with the necessary external guarantee of his inner consciousness that man is good, because made so by his Creator—inclined indeed to evil, but yet a good being, even so inclined. Nothing is more necessary for one who is to be a teacher among a population whose Catholicity is of blood and family tradition as well as of grace, than to know that there is virtue, true and high in its own order, outside the visible pale of the Church. Especially is this necessary if Catholics in any age or country are to be fitted for a missionary vocation. That this is the vocation of the Church of his day was Isaac Hecker's passionate conviction. He was able to communicate this to Catholics of the old stock as well as to influence non-Catholics in favor of the Church; perhaps even more so. More than anything else, indeed, Brook Farm taught him the defect of human nature on its highest plane; but it taught him also the worthiness of the men and women of America of the apostle's toil and blood. The gentle natures whom he there knew and learned to love, their spirit of self-sacrifice for the common good, their minds at once innocent and cultivated, their devotion to their high ideal, the absence of meanness, coarseness, vulgarity, the sinking of private ambitions, the patience with the defects of others, their desire to establish the communism of at least intellectual gifts—all this and much more of the kind fixed his views and affections in a mould which eminently fitted him as a vessel of election for apostolic uses.

Before passing to the study of Isaac Hecker's own interior during the period of his residence at Brook Farm, it is our pleasant privilege to communicate to our readers the subjoined charming reminiscence of his personality at the time, from one who was his associate there:

"West New Brighton, S.I., February 28, 1890.—DEAR SIR: I fear that my recollections of Father Hecker will be of little service to you, for they are very scant. But the impression of the young man whom I knew at Brook Farm is still vivid. It must have been in the year 1843 that he came to the Farm in West Roxbury, near Boston. He was a youth of twenty-three, of German aspect, and I think his face was somewhat seamed with small-pox. But his sweet and candid expression, his gentle and affectionate manner, were very winning. He had an air of singular refinement and self-reliance combined with a half-eager inquisitiveness, and upon becoming acquainted with him, I told him that he was Ernest the Seeker, which was the title of a story of mental unrest which William Henry Channing was then publishing in the Dial.

"Hecker, or, as I always called him and think of him, Isaac, had apparently come to Brook Farm because it was a result of the intellectual agitation of the time which had reached and touched him in New York. He had been bred a baker, he told me, and I remember with what satisfaction he said to me, 'I am sure of my livelihood because I can make good bread.' His powers in this way were most satisfactorily tested at the Farm, or, as it was generally called, 'the Community,' although it was in no other sense a community than an association of friendly workers in common. He was drawn to Brook Farm by the belief that its life would be at least agreeable to his convictions and tastes, and offer him the society of those who might answer some of his questions, even if they could not satisfy his longings.

"By what influences his mind was first affected by the moral movement known in New England as transcendentalism, I do not know. Probably he may have heard Mr. Emerson lecture in New York, or he may have read Brownson's Charles Elwood, which dealt with the questions that engaged his mind and conscience. But among the many interesting figures at Brook Farm I recall none more sincerely absorbed than Isaac Hecker in serious questions. The merely aesthetic aspects of its life, its gayety and social pleasures, he regarded good-naturedly, with the air of a spectator who tolerated rather than needed or enjoyed them. There was nothing ascetic or severe in him, but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterward described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father's business.

"I do not remember him as especially studious. Mr. Ripley had classes in German philosophy and metaphysics, in Kant and Spinoza, and Isaac used to look in, as he turned wherever he thought he might find answers to his questions. He went to hear Theodore Parker preach in the Unitarian Church in the neighboring village of West Roxbury. He went into Boston, about ten miles distant, to talk with Brownson, and to Concord to see Emerson. He entered into the working life at the Farm, but always, as it seemed to me, with the same reserve and attitude of observation. He was the dove floating in the air, not yet finding the spot on which his foot might rest.

"The impression that I gathered from my intercourse with him, which was boyishly intimate and affectionate, was that of all 'the apostles of the newness,' as they were gayly called, whose counsel he sought, Brownson was the most satisfactory to him. I thought then that this was due to the authority of Brownson's masterful tone, the definiteness of his views, the force of his 'understanding,' as the word was then philosophically used in distinction from the reason. Brownson's mental vigor and positiveness were very agreeable to a candid mind which was speculatively adrift and experimenting, and, as it seemed to me, which was more emotional than logical. Brownson, after his life of varied theological and controversial activity, was drawing toward the Catholic Church, and his virile force fascinated the more delicate and sensitive temper of the young man, and, I have always supposed, was the chief influence which at that time affected Hecker's views, although he did not then enter the Catholic Church.

"He was a general favorite at Brook Farm, always equable and playful, wholly simple and frank in manner. He talked readily and easily, but not controversially. His smile was singularly attractive and sympathetic, and the earnestness of which I have spoken gave him an unconscious personal dignity. His temperament was sanguine. The whole air of the youth was that of goodness. I do not think that the impression made by him forecast his career, or, in any degree, the leadership which he afterwards held in his Church. But everybody who knew him at that time must recall his charming amiability.

"I think that he did not remain at Brook Farm for a whole year, and when later he went to Belgium to study theology at the seminary of Mons he wrote me many letters, which I am sorry to say have disappeared. I remember that he labored with friendly zeal to draw me to his Church, and at his request I read the life and some writing of St. Alphonse of Liguori. Gradually our correspondence declined when I was in Europe, and was never resumed; nor do I remember seeing him again more than once, many years ago. There was still in the clerical figure, which was very strange to me, the old sweetness of smile and address; there was some talk of the idyllic days, some warm words of hearty good will, but our interests were very different, and, parting, we went our separate ways. For a generation we lived in the same city, yet we never met. But I do not lose the bright recollection of Ernest the Seeker, nor forget the frank, ardent, generous, manly youth, Isaac Hecker.

"Very truly yours,

"GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS."





CHAPTER VI

INNER LIFE WHILE AT BROOK FARM

THE private journals from which we are about to quote so largely were an unhoped-for addition to the stock of materials available for Father Hecker's biography. Until after his death not even their existence, still less the nature of their contents, was suspected. With the exception of two important documents, one written while he was in Belgium, in obedience to the requirements of his director; the other in Rome, for the consideration of the four venerable religious whose advice he sought before founding his community, no records of his interior life have been discovered which are at all comparable in fulness to those made during the eighteen months which preceded his admission to the Church. In his years of health and strength he lived and worked for others; and in those weary ones of illness which followed them, he thought and wrote and suffered, but apparently without making any deliberate notes of his deeper personal experience.

On those of our readers whose acquaintance with Father Hecker dates, as our own does, from his intensely active and laborious prime, these revelations of the period when he was being passively wrought upon and shaped for his work by the hand of God, may produce an effect not unlike that we have been conscious of in studying the greater mass from which our extracts are taken. They will, perhaps, be struck, in the first place, by the unexpectedly strong witness they bear to the wholly interior and mystical experience of the man. They testify, moreover, to the real and objective character of that leading which he was constrained to follow; and not only that. They do so in a way which furnishes a convincing reply to a very plausible doubt as to whether the narrow and uncongenial surroundings of his early life might not, by themselves, be sufficient to explain the discontent of a poetic and aspiring nature such as his.

He was at Brook Farm when that community was at its pleasantest. The shadow of care and the premonition of failure were, indeed, already looming up before those who bore the chief responsibilities of the undertaking, but the group by virtue of whose presence it became famous had hardly begun to dwindle. And besides those whose names have since become well known, there were others, young, gay, intelligent, and well bred, acquaintance and familiarity with whom were in many ways attractive to a susceptible youth like Isaac Hecker. What impression he made upon the circle he entered, how cordially he was received and held in high esteem, our readers already know. And if he gave pleasure, he received it also. At first the new circumstances were a little strange and embarrassing to him. After a fortnight, or thereabouts, we find him noting that he is "not one of their spirits. They say 'Mr. Hecker' in a tone they do not use in speaking to each other." But the strangeness soon wore off and he yielded to the influence of the place with a wholeness which would have been entire but for the stronger drawing which never let him free.

On this point, too, the witness of the journal is peremptory. So it is as to the unity and consistence of his interior experiences from first to last. Child, and boy, and man, there was always the same ardent sincerity of purpose in him, the same docility to the Voice that spoke within, the same attitude toward "the life that now is" which Mr. Curtis, in the letter given in the preceding chapter, has described, with so fine an insight, as one of reserve and observation. "He was the dove floating in the air, not yet finding the spot on which his foot might rest," writes Mr. Curtis of Isaac Hecker at that period of his youth when his surroundings and companions were for the first time, and very possibly for the last, wholly congenial to his natural inclinations. And again: "There was nothing ascetic or severe in him; but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterward described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father's business."

These words are significant testimony to the nobility of the impression made on others by Father Hecker's personality in early manhood. Even if our only addition to such scanty knowledge of his life at Brook Farm as could be gathered from his own conversations in later years were this happily-touched sketch, it could hardly be more interesting than it is. But, fortunately, it does not stand alone. Its fine recognition of the lofty purity of his nature is everywhere borne out by the unpremeditated and candid self-revelations of the diary. Their characteristic trait is everywhere aspiration—a sense of joy in elevation above the earthly, or a sense of depression because the earthly weighs him down. Then come eager glances of inquiry in every direction for the satisfaction of his aspirations, little by little narrowing down to the Catholic Church, wherein the dove of Mr. Curtis's image was finally to rest his foot for ever. And in all this he scarcely at all mentions a dread of the Divine wrath as a motive for his flight. It is not out of the city of destruction, but toward the celestial city that he goes. He is drawn by what he wants, not hounded by what he fears. Always there is the reaching out of a strong nature toward what it lacks—a material for its strength to work on, a craving for rational joy, coupled with an ever-increasing conviction that nature cannot give him such a boon. Men who knew Father Hecker only in his royal maturity, sometimes cavilled at his words of emphatic faith in guileless nature; but they had only to know him a little better to learn his appreciation of the supernatural order, and his recognition of its absolute and exclusive competency to satisfy nature's highest aspirations. Reading these early journals, we have constantly recalled the later days when he so often, and sometimes continually, repeated, "Religion is a boon!" No one could know that better than he who had so deeply felt the want it satisfies.

The diary was begun in the middle of April, 1843, when Isaac had just returned to Brook Farm after a fortnight spent at home. It opens with a prayer for light and direction, which is its dedication to the uses not only of an earnest but a religious seeker. He addresses himself directly to God as Father, not making either appeal or reference to our Lord. But there is in it an invocation to those "that are in heaven to intercede and plead" for him, which recalls the fact, so often mentioned by him, that it was the teaching of the Catechism of the Council of Trent on the Communion of Saints which cleared away his final clouds and brought him directly to the Church. There is a note, too, among his later papers, in which, speaking of the phenomena of modern spiritualism, he says that the same longing for an assurance of personal immortality which leads so many into that maze of mingled truth and error, had a great share in disposing his mind to accept the authoritative doctrine of the Church, which here as elsewhere answered fully the deepest longings of his soul.

We shall not attempt to follow the chronological order of the journal with exactness, but in making our extracts shall pursue the order of topics rather than of time. By the middle of April the question of the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as the necessary preliminary to further progress—to be settled in one way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his struggles for and against it recur with especial frequency. Faber has said somewhere that the Church is the touchstone of rational humanity, and that probably no adult passes out of life without having once, at least, been brought squarely face to face with it and made to understand and shoulder the tremendous responsibility which its claims impose. There would be no need of a touchstone if there were no alloy in human nature, no feebleness in man's will, no darkness in his understanding. Were that the condition of humanity, the call to the supernatural order would be simply the summons to come up higher, its symbol a beacon torch upon the heights. As it is, the path may be mistaken. He whose feet have been set in it from birth by Christian training may wilfully forsake it. He whose heart is pure and whose aspirations noble, may be so surrounded by the mists of inherited error and misapprehension that the light of truth fails to penetrate them when it first dawns. The road is always strait which leads any son of Adam to supernal joy in conscious union with his Creator, even when his will is good and his desire unfeigned.