In the middle of February he opened his mind more fully to Bishop McCloskey, whom he continually calls his spiritual director. He had now to reveal the discoveries of holy penance, and to add to his other motives for leaving the world the dread of falling into mortal sin. He had, he tells us, misgivings as to whether he was ambitious or not. One of his spiritual states he thus alludes to:
"I will ask my confessor how it is—if it is so with others, that they feel no sense of things, no joy, no reality, no emotion, no impulse, nothing positive within or around," but only the consciousness of the need of a terrible atonement. This is accompanied by frantic prayers to God, invocations of the Blessed Virgin, St. Francis of Assisi and other saints. And he says that he has been told that he is scrupulous, and complains that at confession he can only accuse himself in general terms.
Complete abandonment to the divine will seems to have been the outcome of a season of much distress of soul, and bodily mortification. On April 2 he writes: "The last time I saw my director he spoke to me concerning the sacred ministry, and this is a subject I feel an unspeakable difficulty about. I told him that I desired to place myself wholly in his hands and should do whatever he directed. I do not wish to be any more than nothing. I give myself up. So far the Lord seems to be with me, and I hope that He will not forsake me in the future."
As might have been anticipated, Bishop McCloskey's advice was wise. Plainly, his own hope was that young Hecker should enter the secular priesthood, but there is no evidence in the numerous references to the matter in the diary, that this caused him to do more than make his young friend fully acquainted with that state of life. He had him call at the newly-opened diocesan seminary at Fordham and become acquainted with the professors. Bishop Hughes, whom he also consulted, urged him to go to St. Sulpice in Paris, and to the Propaganda in Rome, and make his studies for the secular priesthood. But they failed to win him to their opinion, and were too enlightened to seek to influence him except by argument. Father Hecker ever held the very highest views on the dignity of the priesthood, considering its vocation second to none. But while he was irresistibly inclined to a state of retirement quite incompatible with the duties of the secular priesthood in America, he also felt the most urgent need of constant advice and companionship for guidance in his interior life. These seemingly contradictory requirements he hoped to find united in a religious community, and Bishop McCloskey emphatically assured him that his anticipations would not be disappointed. In addition to this, Isaac Hecker had at least some premonitions of an apostolic vocation calling for a wider range of activity than can be usually compassed by the diocesan clergy. But we have often heard him say that the immediate impulse which induced his application to be made a Redemptorist was need of "intimate and careful spiritual guidance."
His director therefore became satisfied that he should become a religious, and turned his attention to the Society of Jesus, giving him the lives of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier to read, and, doubtless, answered his inquiries about that order. "But," he said in after years, "I had no vocation to teach young boys and felt unfitted for a student's life"; added to this was the certainty of the postponement of any public activity on his part for many years if he became a Jesuit.
After mentioning that he had read the life of St. Francis Xavier, he says that an acquaintance had written him that a German priest, living in Third Street, wanted to see him. This was one of the Redemptorist Fathers who were newly established in the city. This priest, whose name is not given, undertook to assume direction of Isaac, and was very urgent with him to make a spiritual retreat with a view to deciding his vocation. "He is a very zealous person—too much so it seems to me," is the comment in the diary, and the answer was a refusal. But what he saw in the community pleased and attracted Isaac, for everything was poor and plain, and there was an air of solitude. However, he would by no means change his spiritual adviser, writing, "I strive to follow my spiritual director or else I should be fearful of my state. All my difficulties, sins, and temptations I make him acquainted with. . . . Though the world has no particular hold upon me, I give it up once and for all. It gives me pain to feel my perfect want of faith in myself as being in any way useful."
Meantime, on Trinity Sunday, he had been confirmed with his brother George, whose entrance into the Church is here first indicated; no other member of the family became a Catholic. Isaac took the additional name of Thomas on receiving this sacrament, in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Again he writes:
"I have tried to study to-day, but I cannot. Is it not the business of man to save his own soul, and this before all things? Does the study of Greek and Latin help a soul towards its salvation? Is it not quite a different thing from grace? Sometimes I feel strongly inclined to set aside all study, all reading, as superficial and not so important as contemplation and silence."
The time was coming when the Holy Spirit would do this in spite of him and in a way the reverse of pleasant. Meantime he worked away at his books and attended his classes at Cornelius Institute, which was the name of the private school he had been attending, till July 16, the commencement day. In recording his impressions of the school and the acquaintances there made, he says that with one possible exception the young men were of little interest to him, lacking earnestness of character. He does not name the teachers or give the location of the school. Yet he says his experience there had been useful "and chastened my hopes. I have seen by means of it much more clearly into the workings of Protestantism, its want of deep spirituality, its superficiality, and its inevitable tendency to no-religion."