LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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