Life of Father Hecker - Walter Elliott

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the knowledge of good and evil. God knows no evil, and when we become one with Him, through the Mediator, we shall regain our previous state. Knowledge is the effect of sin, and is perhaps destined to correct itself. Consciousness and knowledge go together. Spontaneity and life are one. Knowledge is no gain, for it gives nothing. I can only know what has been given through spontaneity. Spontaneity is unity, one; knowledge is division of being. If Adam had not been separated he would doubtless not have sinned. 'The woman that Thou gavest me said unto me, Eat, and I did eat.' Still, through the seed of the woman, which will be the union restored, is the serpent to be bruised."

      "May 4.—The real effect of the theory of the Church is to isolate men from the outward world, withdraw them from its enjoyments, and make them live a life of sacrifice of the passions. This is one statement. Another would be this: all these things can and should be enjoyed, but in a higher, purer, more exalted state of being than is the present ordinary condition of our minds. The only opposition to them arises when the soul becomes sensual, falls into their arms, and becomes lost to higher and more spiritual objects. …

      "All is dark before me, impenetrable darkness. I appear to live in the centre. Nothing seems to take hold of my soul, or else it seeks nothing. Where it is I know not. I meet with no one else around me. I would that I could feel that some one lived in the same world that I now do. Something cloudy separates us. I cannot speak from my real being to others. There is no mutual recognition. When I speak, it is as if a burden accumulated round me. I long to throw it off, but I cannot utter my thoughts and feelings in their presence; if I do, they return to me unrecognized. Shall I ever meet with one the windows of whose soul will open simultaneously with mine?"

      On the first Sunday of May Isaac went into Boston to hear Brownson preach, and a day or two later made the subjoined shrewd comments on the sermon in a letter to his mother:

      "May 9, '43.—His intention is to preach the Catholic doctrine and administer the Sacraments. How many of them, I suppose, depends on circumstances. He justifies himself on the ground that he that is not against us is for us, and that in times of exigency, and in extraordinary cases, we may do what we could not be excused for doing otherwise. And he thinks by proclaiming the Catholic faith and repudiating the attempt to build up a Church, that in time the Protestant world will become Catholic in its dispositions, so that a unity will be made without submission or sacrifice. Under present circumstances it would be impossible, even if the Protestant churches should be willing to unite with the Catholic, that the Catholic could even supply priests for forty millions of Protestants, the Protestant priests being most of them married, etc.

      "I confess the sermon was wholly unsatisfactory to me, un-catholic in its premises, and many of his arguments and facts chimerical and illusive. If you grant that the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church, there is, to my thought, no stopping-place short of its bosom. Or even if it is the nearest to the truth, you are under obligations to join it. How any one can believe in either one of those propositions, as 0. A. B. does, without becoming a Catholic in fact, I cannot conceive. This special pleading of exceptions, the necessity of the case, and improbable suppositions, springs more, I think, from the position of the individual than from the importance or truth of the arguments made use of. Therefore I think he will give up in time the ground upon which he now supports his course—not the object but his position. … I have bought a few Catholic books in Boston which treat upon the Anglican claims to Catholicity, and I think I can say, so far, I never shall join a Protestant Church—while I am not positive on the positive side, nor even in any way as yet decided."

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       Table of Contents

      STRUGGLES

      THE citations thus far made from Isaac Hecker's youthful diary, although penned at Brook Farm, bear few traces of that fact. They might have been written in a desert for all evidence they give of any special influence produced upon him by personal contact with others. It is not until the middle of May, 1843, that he begins to make any reference to his actual surroundings.

      Before following him into these more intimate self-confidences, and especially before giving in his own words an account of that peculiar occurrence which so permanently affected his future, some preliminary remarks seem necessary.

      It has been said already, in an earlier chapter of this biography, that but for some special intervention of Divine Providence, it is more than probable that Isaac Hecker would have led the ordinary life of men in the world, continuing, indeed, to cherish a high ideal of the duties of the citizen of a free country, but pursuing it along well-beaten ways. There is no doubt that, unless some such event as he has narrated, or some influence equivalent to it in effect, had supernaturally drawn him away, he would of his own volition have sought what he was repeatedly advised to seek by his most attached friends, a congenial union in wedlock. He was naturally susceptible, and his attachments were not only firm, but often seemed obstinate. Of celibacy he had, up to this time, no other idea than such as the common run of non-Catholics possess. At home, indeed, when afterwards pressed to seek a wife, he had answered, truly enough, though holding fast to his secret, that he "had no thought of marrying and felt an aversion to company for such an end." And again he writes to his mother, anxious and troubled for his future, that the circle which surrounded him in New York oppressed and contracted him, and abridged his liberty. There was no one in it who "increased his life."

      But at Brook Farm he met some one, as is revealed by his diary and correspondence, who deeply attracted him, and who might have attracted him as far as marriage had he not already received the Holy Spirit's prevenient grace of virginity. That is to say, he found "a being," to use his impersonal term, whose name and identity he is careful to veil, awkwardly enough at times with misleading pronouns, whose charm was so great as to win from him what would have been, in his normal state, a marital affection. But he was no longer normal. Although still beyond the visible pale of that garden of elect souls, God's holy Church, he was already transformed by the quickening grace which "reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly." Our next quotations afford explicit proof on this point:

      "Tuesday, May 16.—Life appears to be a perpetual struggle between the heavenly and the worldly.

      "Here at Brook Farm I become acquainted with persons who have moved in a higher rank in society than I—persons of good education and fine talents; all of which has an improving influence on me. And I meet with those to whom I can speak, and feel that, to a great degree, I am understood and responded to. In New York I am alone in the midst of people. I am not in any internal sense en rapport with them.

      "I suppose the reason why I do not, in my present state, feel disposed to connect myself with any being, and would rather avoid a person whom I was conscious I might or could love, is that I feel my life to be in a rapid progress, and that no step now would be a permanent one. I am afraid the choice I would have made some time since (if there had not been something deeply secret in my being which prevented me) would now be very unsatisfactory. I feel conscious there could not have been an equal and mutual advance, because the natures of some are not capable of much growth. And I mistrust whether there would not have been an inequality, hence disharmony and unhappiness.

      "To be required to accept your past is most unpleasant. Perhaps the society with which I was surrounded did not afford a being that unified with mine own. And I have faith that there are spiritual laws beneath all this outward framework of sight and sense, which will, if rightly believed in and trusted, lead to the goal of eternal life, harmony of being, and union with God. So I accept my being led here. Am I superstitious or egoistic in believing this? This is, no doubt, disputed territory. Have we any objective rule to compare our faith with which would give us the measure of our superstition? How much of to-day would have seemed miraculous or superstitious to the past? I confess I have no rule or measure to judge the faith of any man.

      "The past is always the state of infancy. The present is an eternal youth, aspiring after manhood; hoping wistfully, intensely desiring, listfully listening, dimly seeing the bright

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