Life of Father Hecker Part 13

HAD Protestantism possessed anything capable of attracting Isaac Hecker he would certainly have found it, for he made due and diligent search. He was, in a manner, bound to do so, for the atmosphere in which he had been born and nurtured had not yet cleared so fully that he could say to himself with positive a.s.surance that there was no safe midway between no-belief and Catholicity.

All the natural influences of his surroundings were such as to draw him to one or other of the Protestant denominations. The power of example and precept in his mother tended that way. The power of public opinion, in so far as it had any religious bearing, was Protestant. The most intelligent and high-minded people he had enjoyed intimate acquaintance with were Protestant by birth and training. True, most of these had fallen away from both the fellowship and the doctrines of orthodoxy; but while they had not the heart to point him to what had been their Egypt, still they had no Promised Land to lead him into, and were confessedly in the Desert.

Yet their influence was indirectly favorable to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicity, although no one but the ministers whom he consulted thought of urging him to identify himself with any variety of it until he showed signs of becoming a Catholic.

To this rule Brownson may appear as a partial exception, but until the summer of 1844 he was so in appearance only. It is true that Isaac Hecker had learned from him the claims of most of the great forms of Protestantism, and got his personal testimony as to the emptiness of them all. Brownson was a competent witness, for he had been an accepted disciple of every school, from sterile Presbyterianism to rank Transcendentalism. Although of a certain testiness of temper, he bore malice to no man and to no body of men.

His testimony was in the presence of patent facts, and his condemnation of all forms of orthodox Protestantism in the end was unreserved. But, up to the date given above he still made a possible exception in favor of Anglicanism. In the middle of April, 1843, he wrote Isaac a letter, motioning him toward this sect, at the same time affirming that he could not quite accept it for himself. Such counsel was no better than motioning him away from it, and was but a symbol of Brownson's own devious progress, swaying now to one side and again to the other, but always going forward to Rome. But young Hecker would learn for himself. Of an abnormally inquiring mind by nature, he never accepted a witness other than himself about any matter if he could help it.

In the early part of 1844 the question of religious affiliation began to press for settlement with increasing urgency, casting him at times into an agony of mind. It was not merely that he was impelled by conscience towards the fulness of truth, but that truth in its simplest elements seemed sometimes to be lacking to him. He was heard to say in after years that, had he not found Catholicity true, he would have been thrown back into a scepticism so painful as to suggest suicide as a relief. Yet those who have trodden any of the paths which lead from inherited heresy to true doctrine, will appreciate the force of the influences, both personal and social, which induced him to reconsider, and make for himself the grand rounds of Protestant orthodoxy before turning his back upon it for ever.

We find him, therefore, going diligently to all who claimed to be watchmen on the walls of Sion, to seek from each one personally that countersign which would tally with the divine word nature and grace were uttering in his own soul. He interviewed ministers repeatedly.

"Not having had," he wrote in this magazine for November, 1887, "personal and experimental knowledge of the Protestant denominations, I investigated them all, going from one of them to another--Episcopal, Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and all--conferring with their ministers and reading their books. It was a dreary business, but I did it. I knew Transcendentalism well and had been a radical socialist. All was found to be as stated above. Brownson's ripe experience and my own thoroughly earnest investigation tallied perfectly. Indeed, the more you examine the Protestant sects in the light of first principles the more they are found to weaken human cert.i.tude, interfere with reason's native knowledge of G.o.d and His attributes, and perplex the free working of the laws of human thought. Protestantism is no religion for a philosopher, unless he is a pessimist--if you can call such a being a philosopher--and adopts Calvinism."

Why Calvinism, with its dread consistency of aversion for human nature, did not attract him in these early inquiries was expressed by Father Hecker in after years by the saying, "Heresy always involves a mutilation of man's natural reason." The typical Calvinist foams against man's natural capacity for the true and the good, and one of its representatives, a Presbyterian minister, had the consistency to say to our young disciple of nature, "Unless you believe that you are totally depraved you will certainly suffer eternal d.a.m.nation." These words were spoken to one who felt some sort of apostleship growing into act within his bosom: to preach the Gospel to those who are totally depraved he perceived to be both vain and suicidal.

Furthermore, the consciousness of his own upright character, his experience and observation of human virtue in others, made abstract arguments needless to prove that Calvinism is an outrage on human kind and a blasphemy against the Creator.

Anglicanism, too--uncleansed, as it notoriously is, of a Calvinistic taint, broken up by absolute license of dissent, maintaining a mere outward conformity to an extremely lax discipline--affronted Isaac Hecker's ideal of the communion of man and G.o.d; man seeking and G.o.d giving the one only revelation of divine truth, unifying and organizing the Christian community: and this in spite of an attraction for the beauty of the Episcopal service which he often confesses in his diary.

In the same scrupulous spirit he tried the Baptists, though he must have known that they were, almost without exception, Calvinists. He had a conference with one of their ministers which, from the account he gives of it, must have degenerated into something like a wrangle.

"If," said young Hecker, "you admit that baptism is not a saving ordinance, why, then, do you separate yourselves from the rest of Christendom on a mere question of ceremonial observance?" There could be no satisfactory answer to this question.

As to the Methodists, they made fifty years ago much less pretension to an intellectual footing in the religious world than at the present day. One thing, Father Hecker tells us, drew his sympathetic regards their way--their doctrine of perfection. He went to one of their ministers, a Dr. Crawford. "I have read in the Bible," said he, "'If thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell all thou hast'; now, that is the kind of Christian I want to be." The answer was: "Well, young man, you must not carry things too far; you are too enthusiastic. Christ does not require that of us in the nineteenth century." After conversing with him for some time, the minister told him to give up such ideas and study for the ministry.

A singular episode in his search was his meeting with two enthusiastic Mormon apostles, and a long and careful examination, under their guidance, of the then newly-delivered revelations and prophecies of Joseph Smith. He describes his Mormon acquaintances as men of some intelligence, but given over, totally and blindly, to Smith's imposture.

But what cut under the claims of every form of Protestantism was the error, common to them all, concerning the rule of faith: the private and independent judgment of the teaching of Scripture made by each man for himself. As the real owner of a homestead has most reason to dread a dealer in false t.i.tles, so the truly free man has most reason to dread false liberty. Isaac Hecker was the type of rational individual liberty, hence the very man to abhor most the caricature of that prerogative in the typical Protestant.

Five years before his death, in an article in _The Catholic World_ ent.i.tled "Luther and the Diet of Worms," Father Hecker put the case thus: "It is a misapprehension common among Protestants to suppose that Catholics, in refusing the appeal of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, condemn the use of reason or individual judgment, or whatever one pleases to call the personal act which involves the exercise of man's intellect and free will. The truth is, personal judgment flows from what const.i.tutes man a rational being, and there is no power under heaven that can alienate personal judgment from man, nor can man, if he would, disappropriate it. The cause of all the trouble at the Diet of Worms was not personal judgment, for neither party put that in question. The point in dispute was the right application of personal judgment. Catholics maintained, and always have and always will maintain, that a divine revelation necessitates a divine interpreter. Catholics resisted, and always will resist, on the ground of its incompetency, a human authority applied to the interpretation of the contents of a divinely-revealed religion. They consider such an authority, whether of the individual or the state, in religious matters an intrusion. Catholics insist, without swerving, upon believing in religion none but G.o.d. . . . To investigate and make one's self certain that G.o.d has made a revelation is of obligation, and consistent with Christianity. But as a divine revelation springs from a source above the sphere of reason, it necessitates a divinely authorized and divinely a.s.sisted _interpreter_ and teacher. This is one of the essential functions of the Church."

That the use of the Scriptures is not, and cannot be made the ordinary means for making all men Christians, was plain to Isaac Hecker for other reasons than the essential one thus clearly stated.

For, if such were the case, G.o.d would bestow on all men the gift to read at sight, or cause all to learn how to read, or would have recorded in the Book itself the words, "Unless a man reads the Bible, and believes what he reads, he cannot enter into the kingdom of G.o.d,"

or their plain equivalent; whereas the Bible, as we have it now, did not exist in the apostolic days, the most glorious era of the Christian Church. Such is Father Hecker's argument in a powerful article in _The Catholic World_ for October, 1883. He continues:

"But suppose that everybody knew how to read, or all men were gifted to read at first sight; suppose that everybody had a copy of the Bible within his reach, a genuine Bible, and knew with cert.i.tude what it means; suppose that Christ himself had laid it down as a rule that the Bible, without note or comment, and as interpreted by each one for himself, is the ordinary way of receiving the grace of salvation--which is the vital principle of Protestantism; suppose all these evident a.s.sumptions as true. Would the Bible even in that case suffice to make any one man, woman, or child a Christian? Evidently not. And why? For that is a personal work, and the personal work of Christ; for Christ alone can make men Christians. And no account of Christ is Christ. . . The contents of a book, whatever these may be, are powerless to place its readers in direct contact and vital relations with its author. No man is so visionary as to imagine that the mental operation of reading the _Iliad,_ or the _Phaedo,_ or the _Divine Comedy,_ suffices to put him in communication with the personality of Homer, or Plato, or Dante. All effort is in vain to slake the thirst of a soul famishing for the _Fountain_ of living waters from a brook, or to stop the cravings of a soul for the living Saviour with a printed book. . . . His words are 'Come unto ME all that are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you.' It was the attempt to make men Christians by reading the Bible that broke Christendom into fragments, multiplied jarring Christian sects, produced swarms of doubters, filled the world with sceptics and scoffers at all religion, frustrated combined Christian action, and put back the Christian conquest of the world for centuries. Three centuries of experience have made it evident enough that, if Christianity is to be maintained as a principle of life among men, it must be on another footing than the suicidal hypothesis invented in the sixteenth century after the birth of its divine Founder."

His farewell interviews with exponents of the Protestant claims were mainly, if not wholly, with representatives of Anglicanism. This did not arise from any grounded hope of getting all he wanted there, but from an insensible drift of his mind upon those currents of thought set in motion by the great power of Newman. The air was full of promise of non-Roman Catholicity, and the voices which called the English-speaking world to listen were the most eloquent since Shakespeare. It needed but a dim hope pointing along any road to induce the delicate conscience of Isaac Hecker to try if it might not be a thoroughfare. But neither in his copious entries in the diary at this period, nor in his articles in this magazine for the year 1887 on Dr. Brownson's difficulties--and these were much like his own--do we find any trace of his discovering in Anglicanism a germ of Catholicity unfolding from the chrysalis of genuine Protestantism and casting it off. This was readily perceived in Isaac Hecker's bearing and conversation by acute Episcopalians themselves, as in the case of Dr. Seabury, who, as Father Hecker relates in the articles above referred to, prophesied Brownson's conversion to Catholicity, and did so for reasons which Seabury must have known would apply to young Hecker also.

Many at this time were being drawn by poetical sentiment to the beautiful and religious forms of Episcopalian worship; drawn and held rather by imagination and feeling than by any adhesion of their minds to distinctive Anglican doctrines. Father Hecker was, indeed, more poetical in temperament than at first acquaintance he seemed to be, but his mind was so const.i.tuted that he must have the main reasons of things, whether religious or not, firmly settled before he could enjoy their use. Nor could he be content with fragments of revealed truth, such as are found in all denominations of non-Catholics.

"There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world," says Newman; "it comes down by tradition from age to age. . . . Men [outside the church] take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them." Not so Father Hecker: no flotsam and jetsam of doctrine for him, unless some fragment would reveal to him the name of the ship from which it had been torn, and the port from which she had sailed, and so lead him to the discovery of the ship herself, crew, cargo, port, and owner.

Yet he lingered long over the claim of Anglicanism to be the Catholic religion. Of Mr. Haight and of his interviews with him we have already spoken. Through him he came across a published letter of a Mr. Norris, Episcopal minister in Carlisle, Pa., which so pleased him for its Catholic tendency that he wrote to him, asking to be allowed to go to Carlisle and live there as the writer's pupil. The answer, though a refusal of this request, was kind, and contained a cordial invitation to visit Mr. Norris after Easter. On his way to Concord, in the following spring, Isaac made a long detour to the little town in southern Pennsylvania, interviewed Mr. Norris, and came away no wiser than before.

The following words of the diary, under date of March 30, 1844, refer to an Episcopal dignitary of higher grade:

"Mr. Haight gave me a note of introduction to Dr. Seabury. I called to see him two evenings ago and had a very pleasant conversation with him. His sociableness and perfect openness of expression I was quite delighted with. He frankly acknowledged that he thought that error had been committed on both sides in the controversy of the Reformation between the Pope and the Anglican Church. He recommended me to examine those points which kept me from joining the Anglican or Roman Church before I should do anything further, as there was the charge of schism against the Anglican Church and neglect of discipline among the members of her communion. I told him that though the Church of Rome may commit errors in practice, she had not committed any in principle, and that it was easier to prune a luxuriant tree than to revivify a tree almost exhausted of life. I left him with an earnest invitation to call again."

This half-confession of schism and frank avowal of lack of discipline on the part of a perfectly representative official of the Anglican Church was something singularly Providential, for it came within a fortnight after Isaac Hecker's first interview with Bishop Hughes, described in the diary under date of March 22. That powerful man and great prelate was a type of the best form of Catholicism at that day.

He was of the Church militant in more senses than one; and the military qualities which have inspired the public action of Catholic champions for the past three centuries were strongly developed in him. That it was for the good of religion that it should have such characters as John Hughes to care for its public welfare there is no room to doubt. Since then the temper of Protestant Americans has undergone a change which is almost radical. It has grown infinitely more just and kindly towards Catholics. The decay of the Protestant bond of cohesion from lapse of time and from the unsettlement of belief in its chief doctrines; the fighting of two wars, one of them the great Rebellion, which fused the populations of States and acquainted men better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop Hughes himself and of his contemporaries--these and other causes have made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a different spirit from what wisdom dictated fifty years ago.

If Dr. Seabury owned to schism and lack of discipline in Anglicanism, Bishop John Hughes brought out to Isaac Hecker the very contrary as the attractive qualities of Catholicity. He was questioned by the young inquirer about the latter's chances for studying for the priesthood should he decide on entering the Church, and he answered according to rigid notions of the place of authority in religion.

"He said," are the words of the diary, ending a summary of the interview, "that their Church was one of discipline. I thanked him for the information that he gave, and told him that it was for just such instruction that I sought him. He seemed to think that I had some loose notions of the Church. So far, this settles my present intention of uniting myself with the Roman Catholic Church. Though I feel not in the least disinclined to be governed by the most rigid discipline of any church, yet I am not prepared to enter the Roman Catholic Church at present. It is not national with us, hence it does not meet our wants, nor does it fully understand and sympathize with the experience and dispositions of our people. It is princ.i.p.ally made up of adopted and foreign individuals."

To us this is exceedingly instructive, for it tells us how _not_ to meet the earnest seeker after Catholic truth. Even a good-natured dog does not show his teeth when caressed, nor is an artillery salute the only show of amity between even warlike powers. Yet the repellant att.i.tude of the great controversialist was that of very many representative Catholics of his time, especially those holding his high office. For although he really did know the American people, and although their country was fully his own, and was by him deeply and intelligently loved, yet he did not understand or sympathize with the religious movements of which his strange young visitor was the truest type. He afterwards knew him better and loved him.

The toss thus given Isaac Hecker by Bishop Hughes's catapult of "discipline" had the good effect of throwing him again upon a full and perfect and final investigation of Protestantism. With what immediate result is shown by the Seabury interview already related, and with what honesty of purpose is shown by the following words written the same day:

"If a low pa.s.sion usurps the place of pure love, if a blind prejudice usurps the place of Catholic truth, he who informs me of it, though he had been my enemy (if enemies it is possible for me to have), I will receive him as an angel from heaven, as an instrument of G.o.d. My honor, my consistency, my character consists in faithfulness to G.o.d's love, G.o.d's truth, and nothing else. Let me be but true to Him--how then can I be false to either man or the world? It is Him who knows our secret thoughts that we should fear (if fear we must) and obey."

Thus it was Anglicanism that engaged Isaac Hecker's last efforts to adjust a Protestant outside to his inward experience with the Holy Spirit; and this for a reason quite evident. That body pretended, then as now, to be the Catholic Christian Church, a.s.sisting men to union with G.o.d by a divinely-founded external organism, but not demanding the sacrifice of human liberty. To an inexperienced observer such as he, it seemed possible that Anglicanism might be the union of historical Christianity with manly freedom. Closer observation proved to him not only the compatibility of Catholicity and liberty, but that Anglicanism, though a.s.suming some of the forms of Catholic unity, is kept alive by the principle of individual separatism common to all Protestant sects. For a time, or in a place, it may have much or little of Catholicity; but in no place can it live for a day without the Protestant principle of a right of final appeal to the individual judgment to decide upon the verity of doctrine.

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CHAPTER XIV

HIS LIFE AT CONCORD

"I HAVE been groping in darkness, seeking where Thou wast not, and I found Thee not. But, O Lord my G.o.d, _Thou hast found me_--leave me not."

These words are part of a long prayer written by Isaac Hecker in his diary April 23, 1844, after his arrival at Concord, Ma.s.s. He appears to have gone directly there from Carlisle, Pa., where he had spent some days with the Rev. William Herbert Norris, whose published letter to "A Sincere Enquirer" had excited in the young man a hope that he might find in him a teacher whose deep inward experiences would be complemented by the adequate external guaranty that he was seeking. We have already noted that he was disappointed. He states the reason very suggestively in a letter written at the time:

"Alas, that men should speak of those things they are most ignorant of! What hopes did he not awaken in my bosom as I read his letter to a Sincere Enquirer, and how were they blasted when I met him and found that it was not he, but Hooker, Newman, Paul, etc.! It is a sad fact that many believe, but very few give themselves up to what they believe so that they may have the substance of their belief."

Isaac Hecker's business in Concord had, as usual, two sides.

Externally it meant going on with Greek and Latin, under the guidance of the lately deceased George P. Bradford, a scholar of rare acquirements, whose acquaintance he had made at Brook Farm the previous year. The end he sought in this study was to fit himself for "working in the field of the church." But as the question of which church was not even yet fully settled in his mind, his search for the true religion still remained his deepest and most inmost purpose.

Nevertheless, he was enjoying at this time one of his periods of profound interior and exterior peace. "I feel," he writes, "that I am growing in G.o.d's grace. To Him I look for support. Will He not impart wisdom as well as love?"

His surroundings at Concord are so vividly described in the letters he wrote to his family that we cannot omit quotations from them. The first of these is dated at Brook Farm, and describes his efforts to find a room after reaching the village. He seems to have gone at once to Mr. Bradford's house on his arrival.

"April 22, '44.-. . . After supper we sallied forth again. We saw a room, and what do you imagine they charged for it? Seventy-five dollars a year!! This was out of the question. We went further and found a room, good size, very good people, furnished, and to be kept in order for eight dollars a quarter. This seemed reasonable to me, and also to Mr. Bradford. I felt safe in telling the lady that I thought I should take it. I requested Mr. Bradford to keep a look-out for me while I was gone, and if we could not find a better place before I returned I would accept this. This morning I left Concord to come and see Charles Dana concerning the books I shall require, and to see some of my friends. I got into Boston at ten o'clock, and walked out here by dinner-time. All of the old set that are here were delighted to see me. I have conversed with a few of them, and find them more open to consider the claims of the Church than I had antic.i.p.ated."

"Concord, April 24, '44.--Dear Friends: This evening I can say that I am settled, comfortably settled in every particular. All that is needed for my comfort is here: a good straw bed, a large table, carpet, washstand, book-case, stove, chairs, looking-gla.s.s--all, all that is needful. And this for seventy-five cents a week, including lights; wood is extra pay. This is the inanimate about me. The lady of the house, Mrs. Th.o.r.eau, _is a woman._ The only fear I have about her is that she is too much like dear mother--she will take too much care of me. She has told me how she used to sit up nights, waiting for a young man whom she had taken to board, to come home. He was a stranger to her, but still she insists that she must treat all as she would her own, and even with greater care. If you were to see her, mother, you would be perfectly satisfied that I have fallen into good hands, and met a second mother, if that is possible."

"April 25, 1:30 P.M.--I have just finished my dinner; it was _ein herrliches Essen._ Unleavened bread (from home), maple-sugar, and apples which I purchased this morning. Previous to taking dinner I said my first lesson to Mr. Bradford in Greek and Latin.

"I am extremely well situated, and feel contented in myself, and deeply grateful to you all for your goodness in helping me to pursue the real purpose of my being. All we can do is to be faithful to G.o.d and to the work He has given us to do, and, whatever end He may lead us to, to have that central faith that 'all is for the best.' There is only one life, and that is life in G.o.d; and only one death, and that is separation from Him. And this life is not and cannot be measured by the external eye. We must be fixed in G.o.d before we can do anything rightly--study, labor, social, political or of any kind. . . .

"I have written this letter full of nothingness; I will be more settled the next time and do better. Send all your love to me--think more of heaven and we shall grow happier. If once celestial love has touched us, we cannot rest until it dwells and abides in our hearts.

To you all I send my warmest and purest love.--ISAAC."

"Concord, May 2, 1844.--Dear Friends: It was my intention not to write home until I had received a letter from you; but as none has yet come, and I am in want of a few things, I will write you immediately.

"You can scarcely imagine how different my life is now from what it was at home. It is like living in another world. It is possible that you might not be suited with the conditions here, but to me they are the very ones which are congenial to my present state of being. I am alone from early dawn to late at night; no one to intrude upon my quiet except Mr. Bradford, who occupies the hour between twelve and one to hear my recitations, and Mrs. Th.o.r.eau a few minutes in making my bed in the mornings. The rest of my time is devoted to study, communion, and, a little of it, to reading. How unlike the life at home!

"The thought just occurs to me that if such a life seems desirable to you, how easily you could obtain it. What is it that costs so much labor of mind and body? Is it not that which we consume on and in our bodies? Then, if we reduce the consumption there will be less need of production. Most of our labor is labor for the body. We are treasuring up corruption for the day of death; is this not so? As we rise in spirit above the body we shall bring all its appet.i.tes into subjection to the moral law. . . .

"This is what I should like you to do for me. All the food that I brought with me is gone, and as I would like to have my razor sent on, and as the articles you can give me would be better than any I can get here, you will be so kind as to send with it the following list, if you think best: 1. Put in some hard bread. 2. A few unleavened wheat biscuits, such as I used to make. 3. Some unleavened Graham biscuits. 4. A five-cent or ten-cent loaf of bread, if you think it will keep good until it gets here. 5. Get me a linen summer frock-coat such as are worn--those loose ones. Dunster has my measure and he can cut it for you. Let it be made. I have only a summer jacket with me, and that is John's. 6. Do not forget the razor. You can put in any other simple, solid food, if you wish to send any. Do I ask too much from you? If so, you must be kind enough to tell me.