HAD Protestantism possessed anything capable of attracting Isaac Hecker he would certainly have found it, for he made due and diligent search. He was, in a manner, bound to do so, for the atmosphere in which he had been born and nurtured had not yet cleared so fully that he could say to himself with positive assurance that there was no safe midway between no-belief and Catholicity.

All the natural influences of his surroundings were such as to draw him to one or other of the Protestant denominations. The power of example and precept in his mother tended that way. The power of public opinion, in so far as it had any religious bearing, was Protestant. The most intelligent and high-minded people he had enjoyed intimate acquaintance with were Protestant by birth and training. True, most of these had fallen away from both the fellowship and the doctrines of orthodoxy; but while they had not the heart to point him to what had been their Egypt, still they had no Promised Land to lead him into, and were confessedly in the Desert. Yet their influence was indirectly favorable to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicity, although no one but the ministers whom he consulted thought of urging him to identify himself with any variety of it until he showed signs of becoming a Catholic.

To this rule Brownson may appear as a partial exception, but until the summer of 1844 he was so in appearance only. It is true that Isaac Hecker had learned from him the claims of most of the great forms of Protestantism, and got his personal testimony as to the emptiness of them all. Brownson was a competent witness, for he had been an accepted disciple of every school, from sterile Presbyterianism to rank Transcendentalism. Although of a certain testiness of temper, he bore malice to no man and to no body of men. His testimony was in the presence of patent facts, and his condemnation of all forms of orthodox Protestantism in the end was unreserved. But, up to the date given above he still made a possible exception in favor of Anglicanism. In the middle of April, 1843, he wrote Isaac a letter, motioning him toward this sect, at the same time affirming that he could not quite accept it for himself. Such counsel was no better than motioning him away from it, and was but a symbol of Brownson's own devious progress, swaying now to one side and again to the other, but always going forward to Rome. But young Hecker would learn for himself. Of an abnormally inquiring mind by nature, he never accepted a witness other than himself about any matter if he could help it.

In the early part of 1844 the question of religious affiliation began to press for settlement with increasing urgency, casting him at times into an agony of mind. It was not merely that he was impelled by conscience towards the fulness of truth, but that truth in its simplest elements seemed sometimes to be lacking to him. He was heard to say in after years that, had he not found Catholicity true, he would have been thrown back into a scepticism so painful as to suggest suicide as a relief. Yet those who have trodden any of the paths which lead from inherited heresy to true doctrine, will appreciate the force of the influences, both personal and social, which induced him to reconsider, and make for himself the grand rounds of Protestant orthodoxy before turning his back upon it for ever.

We find him, therefore, going diligently to all who claimed to be watchmen on the walls of Sion, to seek from each one personally that countersign which would tally with the divine word nature and grace were uttering in his own soul. He interviewed ministers repeatedly. "Not having had," he wrote in this magazine for November, 1887, "personal and experimental knowledge of the Protestant denominations, I investigated them all, going from one of them to another—Episcopal, Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and all—conferring with their ministers and reading their books. It was a dreary business, but I did it. I knew Transcendentalism well and had been a radical socialist. All was found to be as stated above. Brownson's ripe experience and my own thoroughly earnest investigation tallied perfectly. Indeed, the more you examine the Protestant sects in the light of first principles the more they are found to weaken human certitude, interfere with reason's native knowledge of God and His attributes, and perplex the free working of the laws of human thought. Protestantism is no religion for a philosopher, unless he is a pessimist—if you can call such a being a philosopher—and adopts Calvinism."

Why Calvinism, with its dread consistency of aversion for human nature, did not attract him in these early inquiries was expressed by Father Hecker in after years by the saying, "Heresy always involves a mutilation of man's natural reason." The typical Calvinist foams against man's natural capacity for the true and the good, and one of its representatives, a Presbyterian minister, had the consistency to say to our young disciple of nature, "Unless you believe that you are totally depraved you will certainly suffer eternal damnation." These words were spoken to one who felt some sort of apostleship growing into act within his bosom: to preach the Gospel to those who are totally depraved he perceived to be both vain and suicidal. Furthermore, the consciousness of his own upright character, his experience and observation of human virtue in others, made abstract arguments needless to prove that Calvinism is an outrage on human kind and a blasphemy against the Creator.

Anglicanism, too—uncleansed, as it notoriously is, of a Calvinistic taint, broken up by absolute license of dissent, maintaining a mere outward conformity to an extremely lax discipline—affronted Isaac Hecker's ideal of the communion of man and God; man seeking and God giving the one only revelation of divine truth, unifying and organizing the Christian community: and this in spite of an attraction for the beauty of the Episcopal service which he often confesses in his diary.

In the same scrupulous spirit he tried the Baptists, though he must have known that they were, almost without exception, Calvinists. He had a conference with one of their ministers which, from the account he gives of it, must have degenerated into something like a wrangle. "If," said young Hecker, "you admit that baptism is not a saving ordinance, why, then, do you separate yourselves from the rest of Christendom on a mere question of ceremonial observance?" There could be no satisfactory answer to this question.

As to the Methodists, they made fifty years ago much less pretension to an intellectual footing in the religious world than at the present day. One thing, Father Hecker tells us, drew his sympathetic regards their way—their doctrine of perfection. He went to one of their ministers, a Dr. Crawford. "I have read in the Bible," said he, "'If thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell all thou hast'; now, that is the kind of Christian I want to be." The answer was: "Well, young man, you must not carry things too far; you are too enthusiastic. Christ does not require that of us in the nineteenth century." After conversing with him for some time, the minister told him to give up such ideas and study for the ministry.

A singular episode in his search was his meeting with two enthusiastic Mormon apostles, and a long and careful examination, under their guidance, of the then newly-delivered revelations and prophecies of Joseph Smith. He describes his Mormon acquaintances as men of some intelligence, but given over, totally and blindly, to Smith's imposture.

But what cut under the claims of every form of Protestantism was the error, common to them all, concerning the rule of faith: the private and independent judgment of the teaching of Scripture made by each man for himself. As the real owner of a homestead has most reason to dread a dealer in false titles, so the truly free man has most reason to dread false liberty. Isaac Hecker was the type of rational individual liberty, hence the very man to abhor most the caricature of that prerogative in the typical Protestant.

Five years before his death, in an article in The Catholic World entitled "Luther and the Diet of Worms," Father Hecker put the case thus: "It is a misapprehension common among Protestants to suppose that Catholics, in refusing the appeal of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, condemn the use of reason or individual judgment, or whatever one pleases to call the personal act which involves the exercise of man's intellect and free will. The truth is, personal judgment flows from what constitutes man a rational being, and there is no power under heaven that can alienate personal judgment from man, nor can man, if he would, disappropriate it. The cause of all the trouble at the Diet of Worms was not personal judgment, for neither party put that in question. The point in dispute was the right application of personal judgment. Catholics maintained, and always have and always will maintain, that a divine revelation necessitates a divine interpreter. Catholics resisted, and always will resist, on the ground of its incompetency, a human authority applied to the interpretation of the contents of a divinely-revealed religion. They consider such an authority, whether of the individual or the state, in religious matters an intrusion. Catholics insist, without swerving, upon believing in religion none but God. . . . To investigate and make one's self certain that God has made a revelation is of obligation, and consistent with Christianity. But as a divine revelation springs from a source above the sphere of reason, it necessitates a divinely authorized and divinely assisted interpreter and teacher. This is one of the essential functions of the Church."

That the use of the Scriptures is not, and cannot be made the ordinary means for making all men Christians, was plain to Isaac Hecker for other reasons than the essential one thus clearly stated. For, if such were the case, God would bestow on all men the gift to read at sight, or cause all to learn how to read, or would have recorded in the Book itself the words, "Unless a man reads the Bible, and believes what he reads, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," or their plain equivalent; whereas the Bible, as we have it now, did not exist in the apostolic days, the most glorious era of the Christian Church. Such is Father Hecker's argument in a powerful article in The Catholic World for October, 1883. He continues:

"But suppose that everybody knew how to read, or all men were gifted to read at first sight; suppose that everybody had a copy of the Bible within his reach, a genuine Bible, and knew with certitude what it means; suppose that Christ himself had laid it down as a rule that the Bible, without note or comment, and as interpreted by each one for himself, is the ordinary way of receiving the grace of salvation—which is the vital principle of Protestantism; suppose all these evident assumptions as true. Would the Bible even in that case suffice to make any one man, woman, or child a Christian? Evidently not. And why? For that is a personal work, and the personal work of Christ; for Christ alone can make men Christians. And no account of Christ is Christ. . . The contents of a book, whatever these may be, are powerless to place its readers in direct contact and vital relations with its author. No man is so visionary as to imagine that the mental operation of reading the Iliad, or the PhÆdo, or the Divine Comedy, suffices to put him in communication with the personality of Homer, or Plato, or Dante. All effort is in vain to slake the thirst of a soul famishing for the Fountain of living waters from a brook, or to stop the cravings of a soul for the living Saviour with a printed book. . . . His words are 'Come unto ME all that are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you.' It was the attempt to make men Christians by reading the Bible that broke Christendom into fragments, multiplied jarring Christian sects, produced swarms of doubters, filled the world with sceptics and scoffers at all religion, frustrated combined Christian action, and put back the Christian conquest of the world for centuries. Three centuries of experience have made it evident enough that, if Christianity is to be maintained as a principle of life among men, it must be on another footing than the suicidal hypothesis invented in the sixteenth century after the birth of its divine Founder."

His farewell interviews with exponents of the Protestant claims were mainly, if not wholly, with representatives of Anglicanism. This did not arise from any grounded hope of getting all he wanted there, but from an insensible drift of his mind upon those currents of thought set in motion by the great power of Newman. The air was full of promise of non-Roman Catholicity, and the voices which called the English-speaking world to listen were the most eloquent since Shakespeare. It needed but a dim hope pointing along any road to induce the delicate conscience of Isaac Hecker to try if it might not be a thoroughfare. But neither in his copious entries in the diary at this period, nor in his articles in this magazine for the year 1887 on Dr. Brownson's difficulties—and these were much like his own—do we find any trace of his discovering in Anglicanism a germ of Catholicity unfolding from the chrysalis of genuine Protestantism and casting it off. This was readily perceived in Isaac Hecker's bearing and conversation by acute Episcopalians themselves, as in the case of Dr. Seabury, who, as Father Hecker relates in the articles above referred to, prophesied Brownson's conversion to Catholicity, and did so for reasons which Seabury must have known would apply to young Hecker also.

Many at this time were being drawn by poetical sentiment to the beautiful and religious forms of Episcopalian worship; drawn and held rather by imagination and feeling than by any adhesion of their minds to distinctive Anglican doctrines. Father Hecker was, indeed, more poetical in temperament than at first acquaintance he seemed to be, but his mind was so constituted that he must have the main reasons of things, whether religious or not, firmly settled before he could enjoy their use. Nor could he be content with fragments of revealed truth, such as are found in all denominations of non-Catholics. "There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world," says Newman; "it comes down by tradition from age to age. . . . Men [outside the church] take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them." Not so Father Hecker: no flotsam and jetsam of doctrine for him, unless some fragment would reveal to him the name of the ship from which it had been torn, and the port from which she had sailed, and so lead him to the discovery of the ship herself, crew, cargo, port, and owner.

Yet he lingered long over the claim of Anglicanism to be the Catholic religion. Of Mr. Haight and of his interviews with him we have already spoken. Through him he came across a published letter of a Mr. Norris, Episcopal minister in Carlisle, Pa., which so pleased him for its Catholic tendency that he wrote to him, asking to be allowed to go to Carlisle and live there as the writer's pupil. The answer, though a refusal of this request, was kind, and contained a cordial invitation to visit Mr. Norris after Easter. On his way to Concord, in the following spring, Isaac made a long detour to the little town in southern Pennsylvania, interviewed Mr. Norris, and came away no wiser than before.

The following words of the diary, under date of March 30, 1844, refer to an Episcopal dignitary of higher grade:

"Mr. Haight gave me a note of introduction to Dr. Seabury. I called to see him two evenings ago and had a very pleasant conversation with him. His sociableness and perfect openness of expression I was quite delighted with. He frankly acknowledged that he thought that error had been committed on both sides in the controversy of the Reformation between the Pope and the Anglican Church. He recommended me to examine those points which kept me from joining the Anglican or Roman Church before I should do anything further, as there was the charge of schism against the Anglican Church and neglect of discipline among the members of her communion. I told him that though the Church of Rome may commit errors in practice, she had not committed any in principle, and that it was easier to prune a luxuriant tree than to revivify a tree almost exhausted of life. I left him with an earnest invitation to call again."

This half-confession of schism and frank avowal of lack of discipline on the part of a perfectly representative official of the Anglican Church was something singularly Providential, for it came within a fortnight after Isaac Hecker's first interview with Bishop Hughes, described in the diary under date of March 22. That powerful man and great prelate was a type of the best form of Catholicism at that day. He was of the Church militant in more senses than one; and the military qualities which have inspired the public action of Catholic champions for the past three centuries were strongly developed in him. That it was for the good of religion that it should have such characters as John Hughes to care for its public welfare there is no room to doubt. Since then the temper of Protestant Americans has undergone a change which is almost radical. It has grown infinitely more just and kindly towards Catholics. The decay of the Protestant bond of cohesion from lapse of time and from the unsettlement of belief in its chief doctrines; the fighting of two wars, one of them the great Rebellion, which fused the populations of States and acquainted men better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop Hughes himself and of his contemporaries—these and other causes have made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a different spirit from what wisdom dictated fifty years ago.

If Dr. Seabury owned to schism and lack of discipline in Anglicanism, Bishop John Hughes brought out to Isaac Hecker the very contrary as the attractive qualities of Catholicity. He was questioned by the young inquirer about the latter's chances for studying for the priesthood should he decide on entering the Church, and he answered according to rigid notions of the place of authority in religion.

"He said," are the words of the diary, ending a summary of the interview, "that their Church was one of discipline. I thanked him for the information that he gave, and told him that it was for just such instruction that I sought him. He seemed to think that I had some loose notions of the Church. So far, this settles my present intention of uniting myself with the Roman Catholic Church. Though I feel not in the least disinclined to be governed by the most rigid discipline of any church, yet I am not prepared to enter the Roman Catholic Church at present. It is not national with us, hence it does not meet our wants, nor does it fully understand and sympathize with the experience and dispositions of our people. It is principally made up of adopted and foreign individuals."

To us this is exceedingly instructive, for it tells us how not to meet the earnest seeker after Catholic truth. Even a good-natured dog does not show his teeth when caressed, nor is an artillery salute the only show of amity between even warlike powers. Yet the repellant attitude of the great controversialist was that of very many representative Catholics of his time, especially those holding his high office. For although he really did know the American people, and although their country was fully his own, and was by him deeply and intelligently loved, yet he did not understand or sympathize with the religious movements of which his strange young visitor was the truest type. He afterwards knew him better and loved him.

The toss thus given Isaac Hecker by Bishop Hughes's catapult of "discipline" had the good effect of throwing him again upon a full and perfect and final investigation of Protestantism. With what immediate result is shown by the Seabury interview already related, and with what honesty of purpose is shown by the following words written the same day:

"If a low passion usurps the place of pure love, if a blind prejudice usurps the place of Catholic truth, he who informs me of it, though he had been my enemy (if enemies it is possible for me to have), I will receive him as an angel from heaven, as an instrument of God. My honor, my consistency, my character consists in faithfulness to God's love, God's truth, and nothing else. Let me be but true to Him—how then can I be false to either man or the world? It is Him who knows our secret thoughts that we should fear (if fear we must) and obey."

Thus it was Anglicanism that engaged Isaac Hecker's last efforts to adjust a Protestant outside to his inward experience with the Holy Spirit; and this for a reason quite evident. That body pretended, then as now, to be the Catholic Christian Church, assisting men to union with God by a divinely-founded external organism, but not demanding the sacrifice of human liberty. To an inexperienced observer such as he, it seemed possible that Anglicanism might be the union of historical Christianity with manly freedom. Closer observation proved to him not only the compatibility of Catholicity and liberty, but that Anglicanism, though assuming some of the forms of Catholic unity, is kept alive by the principle of individual separatism common to all Protestant sects. For a time, or in a place, it may have much or little of Catholicity; but in no place can it live for a day without the Protestant principle of a right of final appeal to the individual judgment to decide upon the verity of doctrine.

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