BISHOP McCLOSKEY, afterwards the first American Cardinal, was coadjutor to Bishop Hughes from 1844 to 1847. He was living at the old Cathedral when Isaac Hecker first called upon him. He was still a young man, less than ten years separating him from the youthful catechumen. In temperament they were very different. The bishop, a man of routine in method and of no original views of principles, was so, nevertheless, by mental predisposition rather than by positive choice. He was a man of finished education; a dignified speaker, whose words read as impressively as they sounded. Although the two men were so unlike, the bishop could, at least after brief hesitation, fully appreciate Isaac Hecker; nay, could love him, could further his plans, and stand by him in his difficulties. Before we are done with this Life, the reader will see this more in detail.

Nor was Bishop McCloskey without light as a judge in spiritual matters. By nature calm and self-poised, and readily obedient to reason, the grace of his high office, his wide knowledge of men, his extensive reading, were doubtless supplemented by a special infusion of heavenly wisdom, due to his upright purpose and his spotless life. Though not timid, he was not conspicuous for courage; his refuge in difficulty was a high order of prudence, never cowardice; nor did he err either by precipitancy, by cruelty, or by rigidity of adherence to abstract rules of law. Father Hecker knew him thoroughly well, and admired him; more, he profited by his guidance, and that not only at this earliest period of their intercourse. It was by him that Isaac Hecker's vocation was, though not revealed, yet most wisely directed. Brownson told the young man that he ought to devote himself to the Germans in this country; Bishop Hughes advised him to go to St. Sulpice and study for the secular priesthood; Bishop McCloskey told him to become a religious.

Hitherto Isaac Hecker's environment had been entirely non-Catholic; the ebbing and flowing of a sea of doubt and inquiry upon which floated small boats and rafts which had been cast off from the good ship of Christ. Now that he was on board the ship itself, he found its crew and passengers sailing straight on toward their destined haven, paying small regard, as a rule, to the small craft and the shipwrecked sailors tossing on the wild waves around them, and only surprised when one or another hailed their vessel and asked to be taken on board. Nor did the attitude of non-Catholics, taking them generally, invite anything else. Isaac Hecker, passing into the Church, not only came into contact with its members, but was to be for some years exclusively in their company. But, though carried beyond the Ripleys, the Alcotts, the Lanes, the Emersons, and beyond the theories they in some sort stand for and represent, he had learned them and their lesson, and never lost his aptitude for returning to their company with a Catholic message. His farewell to that class did not involve loss of affectionate interest, for in mind he continually reverted to them. He knew that their peculiar traits were significant of the most imperative invitation of Providence to missionary work. He thought it was to that class, or, rather, to the multitude to whom they were prophets, that the exponent of Catholicity should first address himself. They possessed the highest activity of the natural faculties; they were all but the only class of Americans who loved truth for its own sake, that trait which is the peculiarity of the Catholic mind, and the first requisite for real conversion.

It may have been the latent strength of this conviction that, within a year after his reception into the Church, permanently affected the influence which Brownson had so long exerted over him. It ceased now to be in any sense controlling, and at no future time regained force enough to be directive. They found the Church together, went together into its vestibule, and were received nearly at the same time. And then the wide liberties of a universal religion gave ample scope and large suggestion for the accentuation and development of their native differences. Brownson was a publicist and remained so; Isaac Hecker was a mystic and remained so. To the mysticism of the latter was added an external apostolate; the public activity of the former was, indeed, apostolic, but upon a field not only different from any he would himself have spontaneously chosen, but quite unlike. Our reader already knows how grievous a loss to the public exposition of the Church in America this defection of Brownson's genius from its true direction seemed to Father Hecker. He never ceased to deplore it as a needless calamity, overruled in great measure, indeed, by the good Providence of God, but not wholly repaired.

Father Hecker's affection for Dr. Brownson never wavered, and his gratitude towards him was only deepened and made more efficacious with the lapse of time and the growth of his own spiritual experience. If they did not always agree, either in principles or in questions of policy, they always loved each other. The memoranda furnish an interesting proof of this abiding affection on the part of Father Hecker. He was asked:

"Don't you think we might have a memorial tablet to Dr. Brownson in our church?"

"Yes! Of all the men I ever knew, he had most influence over me."

"When you were in early life?"

"Yes, of course. Oh! in after life no man has had influence with me, but only God."

This meant, of course, the influence of master upon disciple, and not that of lawful authority or of fraternal love, to both of which Father Hecker was ever very sensitive.

Speaking at another time of Brownson, he quoted this sentence from The Convert as so perfect an epitome of the man that it should be put on his monument:

"I had one principle, and only one, to which, since throwing up Universalism, I had been faithful; a principle to which I had, perhaps, made some sacrifices—that of following my own honest convictions whithersoever they should lead me."

And just here is found one of those points of essential difference which it is interesting to note between these two men, so closely drawn together by Divine Providence at one period, and in such a relation that to the elder the function of guidance seemed to have been appointed. In unswerving fidelity to conviction they were on a par, but in native clearness of vision and instinctive aversion from error they were far less closely matched. Brownson in early life had tried, accepted, and preached various forms of aberration from true doctrine. One might say of him, that, having found himself outside the highway at his start, he gathered accretions from hedge and ditch as he struggled toward the true road, and went through an after process of sloughing them one by one. Perhaps that process ended in making him over-timid. It was otherwise with Isaac Hecker. He, too, had stopped to consider many doctrines which purported to be true; more than that, he had recognized in each the modicum of truth which it possessed. But the falsity with which this was overloaded was powerful enough to repel him, in spite of the truth he knew to be contained in it. He carried in himself the touchstone to which all that was akin to it beyond him responded of necessity. The Light which lights every man who comes into the world had not only never been darkened in him by sinful courses, but it seemed to burn with a crystal clearness which threw up into hideous and repellant proportions all that was offensive to it. Many voices had called him from without, but he had refused obedience unto any. He never submitted until his submission was full and not to be withdrawn. So, once in the Church, and enjoying her divine guarantee of external authority, he had few if any disquieting recollections of error to breed distrust of the light that shone within him. His soul was of that order to which truth speaks authoritatively and at first hand; of that soil from which institutions which are to stand spring by a true process of development, because it is the soil which first received their germs. Always it is the soul of man which is inspired, the mind of man that is enlightened. Then the teaching comes as record of the fact and the doctrine; then the institution solidifies about them, a perpetual witness that to many men and ages of men the same message has been handed down by its first recipients and has produced in them its proper results. The race of such souls has not died out in the Christian Church. The one truth, spoken once for all by the Incarnate Word, takes on for them new aspects and new tones. They are the pioneers of great movements. Nurtured in the Church, their ardor burns away mere conventionalities; born outside the Church, the light she carries is a beacon, and the voice she utters is felt as that of the true Mother. To adapt once more a pregnant sentence from young Hecker, of the truth of which he was himself an example: "It is God in them which believes in God."

But to return to Brownson. An entry in the journal, made nearly a year later, sums up the total impression which Brownson had made upon his young disciple:

"June 22, 1845.—0. A. B. is here. He arrived this morning. Though he is a friend to me, and the most critical periods of my experience have been known to him, and he has frequently given me advice and sympathy, yet he never moves my heart. He has been of inestimable use to me in my intellectual development. He is, too, a man of heart. But he is so strong, and so intellectually active, that all his energy is consumed in thought. He is an intellectual athlete. He thinks for a dozen men. He does not take time to realize in heart for himself. No man reads or thinks more than he. But he is greater as a writer than as a person. There are men who never wrote a line, but whose influence is deeper and more extensive than that of others who have written heavy tomes.

"It is too late for Brownson to give himself to contemplation and interior recollection. He is a controversialist; a doctor. The last he will be before long. Some have wondered why I should have contracted such a friendship for one whom they imagine to be so harsh and dictatorial. I have not felt this. His presence does not change me; nor do I find myself where I was not after having met him. He has not the temperament of a genius, but that of a rhetorician and declaimer. He arrives at his truths by a regular and consecutive system of logic. His mind is of a historical more than of a poetical mould.

"As a man, I have never known one so conscientious and self-sacrificing. This is natural to him. His love of right is supreme, and the thing he detests most is bad logic. It makes him peevish and often riles his temper. He defeats, but will never convince an opponent. This is bad. No one loves to break a lance with him, because he cuts such ungentlemanly gashes. He is strong, and he knows it. There is more of the Indian chief than of the Christian knight in his composition. But he has something of both, though nothing of the modern scholar, so called. His art is logic, but he never aims at art. By nature he is a most genuine and true man; none so much so. By no means E——" [Emerson?] "who ever prates about this thing. If he attempts embellishment, you see at once it is borrowed; it is not in his nature. There is a pure and genuine vein of poetry running through him, but it is not sufficient to tincture the whole flow of his life. He is a man of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather than of the nineteenth. He is an anomaly among its scholars, writers, and divines. He is not thorough on any one subject though at home on all. What a finished collegiate education would have done for him I am baffled to conjecture. He is genuine, and I love him for that; it is the crown of all virtues. But I must stop. I only intended to mention that he is here."

The reader may well suppose that Father Hecker fully appreciated Brownson's literary genius. The English language in his grasp was a weapon to slay and a talisman to raise to life. Never was argumentation made more delightful reading; never did a master instruct more exclusively by the aid of his disciple's highest faculties than did Brownson. Habituated his whole life long to the ardent study of the greatest topics of the human understanding, he was able to teach all, as he had taught young Hecker, how to think, discern, judge, penetrate, decide about them with matchless power; and he clothes his conclusions in language as adequate to express them as human language well can be. Clearness, precision, force, purity, vividness, loftiness are terms applicable to Dr. Brownson's literary style. It may be that the general reading public will not study his works merely for the sake of his literary merits; the pleasures of the imagination and of narrative are not to be found in Dr. Brownson. But he certainly will win his way to the suffrages of the higher class of students of fine writing. And let one have any shadow of interest in the great questions he treats, and every page displays a style which is the rarest of literary gifts. The very fact that his writing is untinted by those lesser beauties which catch the eye but to impede its deepest glances, is in itself an excellence all the greater in proportion to the gravity of his topics. Absolutely free from the least obscurity, his diction is a magnetic medium uniting the master's personality, the disciple's understanding, and the essence of the subject under consideration. Cardinal Newman, some may believe, possessed this supreme rhetoric in perhaps even a higher degree than Brownson, but so much can be said of few other writers of English prose. George Ripley, whom Father Hecker deemed the best judge of literature in our country or elsewhere, assured him that there were passages in Dr. Brownson which could not be surpassed in the whole range of English literature.

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