LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      THE TURNING-POINT

      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

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