He continues:
"Lord, let me speak of my many and grievous sins; but oh! when I would do so, my mouth speaks nothing forth but Thy praises.
"I would offer my whole soul afresh to all that is, for the sake of the love of God. . . . Lord, I am Thine, for Thou dost teach me this be Thy unutterable, ever-present love."
"January 3.—Last Saturday my confessor was not at home when I called. I have waited until this morning, the Saturday following. It is sad to me to wait to partake of the Blessed Sacrament. How much joy, love, and sweetness it is to the soul! I feel my soul to glow again with renewed love when I have partaken of the blessed communion of Christ. This is my spiritual food. It is the goodness, mercy, and love of God which keeps me from sadness."
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CHAPTER XX
FROM NEW YORK TO ST. TROND
ISAAC HECKER'S zeal for social reform lent force to his strictly personal cravings for a more religious life; he longed for wider scope than individual effort could possibly bestow, and also for a supernatural point of vantage. "If we would do humanity any good," he writes in his diary while considering his vocation, "we must act from grounds higher than humanity; our standpoint must be above the race, otherwise how can we act upon humanity?" He also speaks of the fundamental necessity of "an impulse of divine love" actuating the reformer of social evils. He addresses himself thus: "If thou wouldst move the race to greater good and higher virtue, lose thyself in the Universal. Be so great as to give thyself to something nobler than thyself if thou wouldst be ennobled, immortalized." In many pages of the last two volumes of his diary these notes of sympathetic love for his fellow-men are mingled with yearnings for solitude. "This book," he writes on the last page of one of them, "has answered some little purpose; for when I wanted to speak to some one and yet was alone, it cost me no labor to scribble in it. It would give me great pleasure if I had a friend who would exchange such thoughts with me." He was soon to enter into that spiritual heritage which among its other treasures bestows the beatitude of the sage, "Blessed is the man who hath found a true friend."
Little by little a distinctly penitential mood came over him, and it occupies nearly the whole of the last volume of the diary with the most unreserved expressions of grief for sin, or, rather, for a state of sinfulness, since the specific mention of sins is nearly altogether wanting. We meet with page after page of self-accusation in general terms: "I am in want of greater love for those around me; I perform my spiritual duties too negligently; too little of my time is devoted to spiritual exercises. I feel all over sick with sin! Here is my difficulty, O Lord, and do Thou direct me: I am always in doubt, when I do not think of Thee alone, that I am sinning and that my time is misspent."
His protestations of sorrow are extremely fervent and very numerous; and as the Lent of 1845 approached he records his purpose of restricting himself to one meal a day. As he never ate meat, nor any "product of animal life," and drank only water, his "nuts, bread, and apples" once a day must have been his diet all through the penitential season. The reader will remember ein herrliches Essen at Concord: "bread, maple-sugar, and apples."