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 to think of him as ever capable of any ambition which had not an end commensurate with mankind itself. To elevate men, to go up with them, not above them, was, from first to last, the scope of his desire. The nature of his surroundings in youth, his personal experience of the hardships of the poorer classes, his intercourse with radical socialists, together with the incomplete character of the religious training given him, made him at first look on politics as a possible and probable means to this desirable end. But he was too sensibly impelled by the Divine impulse toward personal perfection, and too inflexibly honest with himself, not to come early to a thorough realization, on one hand of the fact that man cannot, unaided, rise above his natural level, and, on the other, that no conceivable amelioration of merely social conditions could satisfy his aspirations. And if not his, how those of other men?
One thing that becomes evident in studying this period of Isaac Hecker's life is the fact that his acquaintance with Dr. Brownson marks a turning-point in his views, his opinions, his whole attitude of mind toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then the Saviour of men had been represented to him exclusively as a remedy against the fear of hell; His use seemed to be to furnish a Divine point to which men might work themselves up by an emotional process resulting in an assurance of forgiveness of sin and a secure hope of heaven. Christianity, that is to say, had been presented to him under the form of Methodism. The result had been what might have been anticipated in a nature so averse to emotional excitement and possessing so little consciousness of actual sin. Drawn to God as he had always been by love and aspiration, he was not as yet sensible of any gulf which needed to be bridged between him and his Creator; hence, to present Christ solely as the Victim, the Expiatory Sacrifice demanded by Divine Justice, was to make Him, if not impossible, yet premature to a person like him. Meantime, what he saw and heard all around him, poverty, inequality, greed, shiftlessness, low views of life, ceaseless and poorly remunerated toil, made incessant demands upon him. These things he knew by actual contact, by physical, mental, and moral experience, as a man knows by touch and taste and smell. Men's sufferings, longings, struggles, disappointments had been early thrust upon him as a personal and most weighty burden; and the only relief yet offered was the Christ of emotional Methodism. To a nature more open to temptation on its lower side, and hence more conscious of its radical limitations, even this defective presentation of the Redeemer of men might have appealed profoundly. But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it has from the beginning most vehemently rejected. As a negative force its essence is a protest against organic Christianity. As a positive force it is simply men, taken one by one, dealing separately with God concerning matters strictly personal. True, it is a fundamental verity that men must deal individually with God; but the external test that their dealings with Him have been efficacious, and their inspirations valid, is furnished by the fact of their incorporation into the organic life of Christendom. As St. Paul expresses it: "For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, are yet one body, so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free, and in one Spirit have we all been made to drink."*
[* I Cor. 12:12, 13.]
It is plain, then, that a religion such as Protestantism, which is unsocial and disintegrating by virtue of its antagonistic forces, can contribute little to the solution of social problems. Even when not actively rejected by men deeply interested in such problems, it is tolerably sure that it will be practically ignored as a working factor in their public relations with their fellows. Religion will remain the narrowly personal matter it began; chiefly an affair for Sundays; best attended to in one's pew in church or at the family altar. Probably it may reach the shop, the counter, and the scales; not so certainly the factory, the mine, the political platform, and the ballot. If Christianity had never presented itself under any other aspect than this to Isaac Hecker, it is certain that it would never have obtained his allegiance. Yet it is equally certain that he never rejected Christ under any aspect in which He was presented to him.