"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 star of hope in the future, beckoning him to move rapidly on, while his strong heart beats with enthusiasm and glowing joy. The past is dead. Wish me not the dead from the grave, for that would be death re-enacted. . . .
"Oh, were our wishes in harmony with heaven, how changed would be the scenes of our life! . . . This accordance would be music which only the angels now hear—too delicate for beings such as we are at present. List! hast thou not heard in some bright moment a strain from heaven's angelic choirs? Oh, yes! In our sleep the angels have whispered such rich music, and the soul being then passive, we can hear. And the pleasure does not leave us when passion and thought take their accustomed course.
"O man! were thy soul more pure, what a world would open to thy inner senses! There would be no moment of thy existence but would be filled with the music of love. The prophet said: 'In that day my eyes were opened.' And behold what he saw! He saw it. Could we but hear! The word of the Lord is ever speaking—alas! where is one that can hear? Where are our Isaiahs, our Ezekiels, our Jeremiahs? Oh! thou shrunken-visaged, black, hollow-eyed doubt! hast thou passed like a cloud over men's souls, making them blind, deaf and dumb? Ah, ha! dost thou shudder? I chant thy requiem, and prophets, poets, and seers shall rise again! I see them coming. Great heaven! Earth shall be again a paradise, and God converse with men!"
The next entry is undated, but it was probably made on the last day of May. It has served to fix the proximate time of the illness and disquiet which led to his first withdrawal from business and home.
"Wednesday.—About ten months ago—perhaps only seven or eight—I saw (I cannot say I dreamed; it was quite different from dreaming; I was seated on the side of my bed) a beautiful, angelic being, and myself standing alongside of her, feeling a most heavenly pure joy. It was as if our bodies were luminous and gave forth a moon-like light which sprung from the joy we experienced. I felt as if we had always lived together, and that our motions, actions, feelings, and thoughts came from one centre. When I looked towards her I saw no bold outline of form, but an angelic something I cannot describe, though in angelic shape and image. It was this picture that has left such an indelible impression on my mind. For some time afterward I continued to feel the same influence, and do now so often that the actual around me has lost its hold. In my state previous to my vision I should have married ere this, for there are those I have since seen who would have met the demands of my mind. But now this vision continually hovers over me and prevents me, by its beauty, from accepting any one else; for I am charmed by its influence, and conscious that, should I accept any other, I should lose the life which would be the only one wherein I could say I live."
Those of our readers who are either versed in mystical theology or who have any wide knowledge of the lives of the Church's more interior saints, with neither of which Isaac Hecker had at this time any acquaintance, will be apt to recall here St. Francis of Assisi and his bride, the Lady Poverty, the similar occurrences related by Henry Suso of himself, and the mystic espousals of St. Catharine. We have in this relation not only the plainly avowed reason why he accepted the celibate life, even before entering the Church or arriving at any clear understanding of his duty to do so, but we have something more. Not yet certain of his own vocation, the dream of a virginal apostolate, including the two sexes, had already absorbed his yearnings, never again to be forgotten. Neither priest nor Catholic, save in the as yet unrevealed ordinance of God, he was no longer free to invite any woman to marriage, no matter how deeply he might be sensible of her feminine attraction. The union of souls? Yes; for uses worthy of souls. The union of bodies? No; that would only clip his wings and narrow his horizon. Thenceforward the test of true kinship with him could only be a kindred aspiration after union in liberty from merely natural trammels, in order to tend more surely to a supernatural end.
This may seem to some a strange beginning to a life so simply and entirely set apart from the active, or, at least, public union of the sexes in apostolic labors. Strange or not, the reader will see it to be more true as this biography proceeds, and its writer is not conscious of any reluctance to make it known. Such an integral supernatural mission to men was what he ever after desired and sought to establish, though he only attained success on the male side. We cannot deny that this diary, surprising to us in many ways, was most so in this particular, although in this particular we found the explanation of many words spoken by Father Hecker in his maturity and old age, words the most sober and the most decided we ever heard from him. He never for an hour left out of view the need of women for any great work of religion, though he doubtless made very sure of his auditor before unveiling his whole thought. He never made so much as a serious attempt to incorporate women with his work, but he never ceased to look around and to plan with a view to doing so. Among the personal memoranda already mentioned are found evidences of this so direct, and corroborated by such recent facts, that they cannot be used until the lapse of time shall have made an extension of this life as well possible as necessary.