Life of Father Hecker

by Walter Elliott

"May, 1844.—. . . My studies are pursued with the same spirit in which they were commenced, and there seems to me no reason to fear but that they will be continued in the same for some time to come. However, I would affirm what has been affirmed by me for these two years back, the only consistency that I can promise is submission to the Spirit that is guiding me, whatever may be the external appearance or superficial consequences to others. . . .

"How our astonishment should be excited to perceive that we have been in such a long sleep, and that even now we see but dimly. Let us each ask ourselves in whose business we are employed. Is it our Father's, or is it not? If not, let us immediately turn to the business of our Father, the only object of our life. Let us submit wholly to the guidance of Love."

"TO MRS. CATHERINE J. HECKER. Concord, May 31, 1844.—You speak of my situation as pleasant, and so it is to me. Though the house is situated on the street of a village, the street is beautifully arched with trees for some distance, and my room is very pleasant. One window is wholly shaded by sweet honeysuckle, which is now in blossom, filling the room with its mild fragrance. The little humming-birds visit its flowers frequently without being disturbed by my presence."

The diary, which runs side by side with these letters, was, as usual, the recipient of more intimate self-communings than could be shared with any friend. It shows that although he was now well-nigh convinced of the truth of Catholicity, yet that he still felt a lingering indecision, produced, perhaps, by a haunting memory of the stern front of "discipline" he had encountered in Bishop Hughes. This seemed like a phantom of terror to the young social reformer, whose love of liberty, though rational, was then and ever afterwards one of the passions of his soul. Yet we rarely find now in these pages any statement of specific reasons for and against Catholicity such as were plentiful during the period preceding his acquaintance with Mr. Haight, Dr. Seabury, and Mr. Norris. He seems to shudder as he stands on the bank and looks upon the flowing and cleansing stream; but his hesitancy is caused not so much by any unanswered difficulties of his reason as by his sensibilities, by vague feelings of alarm for the integrity of his manhood. He feared lest the waters might cleanse him by skinning him alive. Catholicity, as typified in Bishop Hughes, her Celtic-American champion, seemed to him "a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass against the whole land."

Now, Isaac Hecker was built for a missionary, and the extreme view of the primary value of highly-wrought discipline which he encountered everywhere among Catholics, though not enough to blind him to the essential liberty of the Church, was enough to delay him in his progress to her. There can be little doubt that multitudes of men and women of less discernment and feebler will than his, have been and still are kept entirely out of the Church by the same cause.

Only at long intervals, as we near the last pages of the large and closely-written book containing the first volume of his diary, do we meet with those agonizing complaints of dryness, the distress of doubt, the weary burden of insoluble difficulties, so common heretofore. He seems, indeed, no longer battling; be victory is won; but it remains to know what are the spoils and where they are to be gathered. Of course there are interludes of his irrepressible philosophizing on moral questions. And at the very end, under date of May 23, 1844, we find the following:

"This afternoon brings me to the close of this book. How different are the emotions with which I close it from those with which I opened it at Brook Farm, now little more (a month) than a year ago! How fruitful has this year been to me! How strangely mysterious and beautiful! And now my soul foreshadows more the next year than ever it presaged before. My life is beyond my grasp, and bears me on will-lessly to its destined haven. Like a rich fountain it overflows on every side; from within flows unceasingly the noiseless tide. The many changes and unlooked-for results and circumstances, within and without, of the coming year I would no more venture to anticipate than to count the stars. It is to me now as if I had just been born, and I live in the Sabbath of creation. Every thing that I see I feel called on to give a name; it has a new meaning to me. Should this life grow—what? It is a singular fact that, although conscious of a more interior and potent force at work within, I am now more quiet and will-less than I was when it at first affected me. I feel like a child, full of joy and pliability; and all ambition of every character seems to have left me. I see where I was heretofore, and the degree of externality which was mixed with the influences that I co-operated with, an externality from which I now feel that I have been freed. It does seem to me that all worldly prospect that ever was before me is gone, and as if I were weak, very weak, in the sight of the world; so I really am. I feel no more potency than a babe. Yet I have a will-less power of love which will conquer through me, and which, O gracious Lord, I never dreamt of before."

In the middle of the above entry he thus notes an interruption, and records a lesson taught by the late New England spring: "George and Burrill Curtis came in, and I have just returned from a walk in the woods with them. May the buds within blossom, and may their fruit ripen in my prayers to God."

He was now, indeed, very near his goal, though even yet he did not clearly see it. And once more all his active powers deserted him. Study became impossible. His mind was drawn so strongly in upon itself that neither work nor play, neither books nor the renewed intercourse which at this period he sought with his old friends in Boston and at Brook Farm, could any longer fasten his attention. He opens his new diary with a record of the trial he has just made in order to discover "whether in mixing with the world I should not be somewhat influenced by their life and brought into new relations with my studies. But it was to no purpose that I went. . . . There was no inducement that I could imagine strong enough to keep me from returning. Ole Bull, whom I very much wished to hear again, was to play the next evening; and Parley Pratt, a friend whom I had not met for a great length of time, and whom I did wish to see, was to be in town the next day. There were many other things to keep me, but none of them had the least effect. I could no more keep myself there than a man could sink himself in the Dead Sea, and so I had to come home.

"I feel a strong inclination to doze and slumber, and more and more in these slumbers the dim shadows that appear in my waking state become clearer, and my conversation is more real and pleasant to me. I feel a double consciousness in this state, and think, 'Now, is not this real? I will recollect it all, what I saw and what I said'; but it flies and is lost when I awake. . . . I call this sleeping, but sleep it is not; for in this state I am more awake than at any other time."