Life of Father Hecker Part 18

"Man is left to his own destiny; religion but sanctifies it."

When the day comes at last, the Sacrament itself gets only the briefest chronicle. The door seems but a door. Pa.s.sing through it, he finds himself at home, and apparently without one quickening of the pulse, or any cessation of his desire to penetrate all its secret chambers. The explanation of this is to be looked for in the presumption that his baptism in infancy had been valid. It was conferred by a Lutheran minister who must have been trained in Germany, and whose methodical adherence to the proper form might be counted on. In the sight of G.o.d, doubtless, he had never since been outside the Church. He was like a child stolen from the cradle, but in whom racial and family traits had been superior to an uncongenial environment.

"Friday, August 1, 1844, 1 P.M.--This morning we were baptized by Bishop McCloskey. To-morrow we attend the tribunal of confession."

Then he mentions a curious fact which recalls a similar experience of St. Catherine of Genoa: "We know not why it is we feel an internal necessity of using the plural p.r.o.noun instead of the singular."

But if conditional baptism left him silent, the Sacrament he certainly received the following day opened the flood-gates of his speech:

"August 2.--Penance! joy! unbounded love! Sweet Jesus, Thy love is infinite! Blessed faith! sweet love! I possess an internal glory, a glowing flame of love! Let my whole life be one act of penance! O dear Jesus, the life-giver! Oh, what a sweet thing it is to be in the way of loveful grace! Jesus, keep me near Thee! Oh, how great a condescension, Jesus is my Friend! Oh! who has the conception of Jesus being his _Friend?_ O ancient faith, how dear, how good is G.o.d in giving us sinners thee! Blessed is the grace of G.o.d that leadeth sinners to thee! Oh, how thou hast comforted the soul! It would turn from thee, but thou strengthenest it. The cup was bitter, but infinitely more sweet is the joy thou givest. My soul is clothed in brightness; its youth is restored. O blessed, ever-blessed, unfathomable, divine faith! O faith of apostles, martyrs, confessors, and saints! Holy Mother of Jesus, thou art my mother. I feel in my heart thy tender love. O holy Mother, thou hast beheld me! Bless me, Virgin Mother of Jesus!"

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CHAPTER XVIII

NEW INFLUENCES

BISHOP McCLOSKEY, afterwards the first American Cardinal, was coadjutor to Bishop Hughes from 1844 to 1847. He was living at the old Cathedral when Isaac Hecker first called upon him. He was still a young man, less than ten years separating him from the youthful catechumen. In temperament they were very different. The bishop, a man of routine in method and of no original views of principles, was so, nevertheless, by mental predisposition rather than by positive choice. He was a man of finished education; a dignified speaker, whose words read as impressively as they sounded. Although the two men were so unlike, the bishop could, at least after brief hesitation, fully appreciate Isaac Hecker; nay, could love him, could further his plans, and stand by him in his difficulties. Before we are done with this Life, the reader will see this more in detail.

Nor was Bishop McCloskey without light as a judge in spiritual matters. By nature calm and self-poised, and readily obedient to reason, the grace of his high office, his wide knowledge of men, his extensive reading, were doubtless supplemented by a special infusion of heavenly wisdom, due to his upright purpose and his spotless life.

Though not timid, he was not conspicuous for courage; his refuge in difficulty was a high order of prudence, never cowardice; nor did he err either by precipitancy, by cruelty, or by rigidity of adherence to abstract rules of law. Father Hecker knew him thoroughly well, and admired him; more, he profited by his guidance, and that not only at this earliest period of their intercourse. It was by him that Isaac Hecker's vocation was, though not revealed, yet most wisely directed.

Brownson told the young man that he ought to devote himself to the Germans in this country; Bishop Hughes advised him to go to St.

Sulpice and study for the secular priesthood; Bishop McCloskey told him to become a religious.

Hitherto Isaac Hecker's environment had been entirely non-Catholic; the ebbing and flowing of a sea of doubt and inquiry upon which floated small boats and rafts which had been cast off from the good ship of Christ. Now that he was on board the ship itself, he found its crew and pa.s.sengers sailing straight on toward their destined haven, paying small regard, as a rule, to the small craft and the shipwrecked sailors tossing on the wild waves around them, and only surprised when one or another hailed their vessel and asked to be taken on board. Nor did the att.i.tude of non-Catholics, taking them generally, invite anything else. Isaac Hecker, pa.s.sing into the Church, not only came into contact with its members, but was to be for some years exclusively in their company. But, though carried beyond the Ripleys, the Alcotts, the Lanes, the Emersons, and beyond the theories they in some sort stand for and represent, he had learned them and their lesson, and never lost his apt.i.tude for returning to their company with a Catholic message. His farewell to that cla.s.s did not involve loss of affectionate interest, for in mind he continually reverted to them. He knew that their peculiar traits were significant of the most imperative invitation of Providence to missionary work. He thought it was to that cla.s.s, or, rather, to the mult.i.tude to whom they were prophets, that the exponent of Catholicity should first address himself. They possessed the highest activity of the natural faculties; they were all but the only cla.s.s of Americans who loved truth for its own sake, that trait which is the peculiarity of the Catholic mind, and the first requisite for real conversion.

It may have been the latent strength of this conviction that, within a year after his reception into the Church, permanently affected the influence which Brownson had so long exerted over him. It ceased now to be in any sense controlling, and at no future time regained force enough to be directive. They found the Church together, went together into its vestibule, and were received nearly at the same time. And then the wide liberties of a universal religion gave ample scope and large suggestion for the accentuation and development of their native differences. Brownson was a publicist and remained so; Isaac Hecker was a mystic and remained so. To the mysticism of the latter was added an external apostolate; the public activity of the former was, indeed, apostolic, but upon a field not only different from any he would himself have spontaneously chosen, but quite unlike. Our reader already knows how grievous a loss to the public exposition of the Church in America this defection of Brownson's genius from its true direction seemed to Father Hecker. He never ceased to deplore it as a needless calamity, overruled in great measure, indeed, by the good Providence of G.o.d, but not wholly repaired.

Father Hecker's affection for Dr. Brownson never wavered, and his grat.i.tude towards him was only deepened and made more efficacious with the lapse of time and the growth of his own spiritual experience. If they did not always agree, either in principles or in questions of policy, they always loved each other. The memoranda furnish an interesting proof of this abiding affection on the part of Father Hecker. He was asked:

"Don't you think we might have a memorial tablet to Dr. Brownson in our church?"

"Yes! Of all the men I ever knew, he had most influence over me."

"When you were in early life?"

"Yes, of course. Oh! in after life no man has had influence with me, but only G.o.d."

This meant, of course, the influence of master upon disciple, and not that of lawful authority or of fraternal love, to both of which Father Hecker was ever very sensitive.

Speaking at another time of Brownson, he quoted this sentence from _The Convert_ as so perfect an epitome of the man that it should be put on his monument:

"I had one principle, and only one, to which, since throwing up Universalism, I had been faithful; a principle to which I had, perhaps, made some sacrifices--that of following my own honest convictions whithersoever they should lead me."

And just here is found one of those points of essential difference which it is interesting to note between these two men, so closely drawn together by Divine Providence at one period, and in such a relation that to the elder the function of guidance seemed to have been appointed. In unswerving fidelity to conviction they were on a par, but in native clearness of vision and instinctive aversion from error they were far less closely matched. Brownson in early life had tried, accepted, and preached various forms of aberration from true doctrine. One might say of him, that, having found himself outside the highway at his start, he gathered accretions from hedge and ditch as he struggled toward the true road, and went through an after process of sloughing them one by one. Perhaps that process ended in making him over-timid. It was otherwise with Isaac Hecker. He, too, had stopped to consider many doctrines which purported to be true; more than that, he had recognized in each the modic.u.m of truth which it possessed. But the falsity with which this was overloaded was powerful enough to repel him, in spite of the truth he knew to be contained in it. He carried in himself the touchstone to which all that was akin to it beyond him responded of necessity. The Light which lights every man who comes into the world had not only never been darkened in him by sinful courses, but it seemed to burn with a crystal clearness which threw up into hideous and repellant proportions all that was offensive to it. Many voices had called him from without, but he had refused obedience unto any. He never submitted until his submission was full and not to be withdrawn. So, once in the Church, and enjoying her divine guarantee of external authority, he had few if any disquieting recollections of error to breed distrust of the light that shone within him. His soul was of that order to which truth speaks authoritatively and at first hand; of that soil from which inst.i.tutions which are to stand spring by a true process of development, because it is the soil which first received their germs. Always it is the soul of man which is inspired, the mind of man that is enlightened. Then the teaching comes as record of the fact and the doctrine; then the inst.i.tution solidifies about them, a perpetual witness that to many men and ages of men the same message has been handed down by its first recipients and has produced in them its proper results. The race of such souls has not died out in the Christian Church. The one truth, spoken once for all by the Incarnate Word, takes on for them new aspects and new tones.

They are the pioneers of great movements. Nurtured in the Church, their ardor burns away mere conventionalities; born outside the Church, the light she carries is a beacon, and the voice she utters is felt as that of the true Mother. To adapt once more a pregnant sentence from young Hecker, of the truth of which he was himself an example: "It is G.o.d in them which believes in G.o.d."

But to return to Brownson. An entry in the journal, made nearly a year later, sums up the total impression which Brownson had made upon his young disciple:

"June 22, 1845.--0. A. B. is here. He arrived this morning. Though he is a friend to me, and the most critical periods of my experience have been known to him, and he has frequently given me advice and sympathy, yet he never moves my heart. He has been of inestimable use to me in my intellectual development. He is, too, a man of heart. But he is so strong, and so intellectually active, that all his energy is consumed in thought. He is an intellectual athlete. He thinks for a dozen men. He does not take time to realize in heart for himself. No man reads or thinks more than he. But he is greater as a writer than as a person. There are men who never wrote a line, but whose influence is deeper and more extensive than that of others who have written heavy tomes.

"It is too late for Brownson to give himself to contemplation and interior recollection. He is a controversialist; a doctor. The last he will be before long. Some have wondered why I should have contracted such a friendship for one whom they imagine to be so harsh and dictatorial. I have not felt this. His presence does not change me; nor do I find myself where I was not after having met him. He has not the temperament of a genius, but that of a rhetorician and declaimer. He arrives at his truths by a regular and consecutive system of logic. His mind is of a historical more than of a poetical mould.

"As a man, I have never known one so conscientious and self-sacrificing. This is natural to him. His love of right is supreme, and the thing he detests most is bad logic. It makes him peevish and often riles his temper. He defeats, but will never convince an opponent. This is bad. No one loves to break a lance with him, because he cuts such ungentlemanly gashes. He is strong, and he knows it. There is more of the Indian chief than of the Christian knight in his composition. But he has something of both, though nothing of the modern scholar, so called. His art is logic, but he never aims at art. By nature he is a most genuine and true man; none so much so. By no means E----" [Emerson?] "who ever prates about this thing. If he attempts embellishment, you see at once it is borrowed; it is not in his nature. There is a pure and genuine vein of poetry running through him, but it is not sufficient to tincture the whole flow of his life. He is a man of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather than of the nineteenth. He is an anomaly among its scholars, writers, and divines. He is not thorough on any one subject though at home on all. What a finished collegiate education would have done for him I am baffled to conjecture. He is genuine, and I love him for that; it is the crown of all virtues. But I must stop. I only intended to mention that he is here."

The reader may well suppose that Father Hecker fully appreciated Brownson's literary genius. The English language in his grasp was a weapon to slay and a talisman to raise to life. Never was argumentation made more delightful reading; never did a master instruct more exclusively by the aid of his disciple's highest faculties than did Brownson. Habituated his whole life long to the ardent study of the greatest topics of the human understanding, he was able to teach all, as he had taught young Hecker, how to think, discern, judge, penetrate, decide about them with matchless power; and he clothes his conclusions in language as adequate to express them as human language well can be. Clearness, precision, force, purity, vividness, loftiness are terms applicable to Dr. Brownson's literary style. It may be that the general reading public will not study his works merely for the sake of his literary merits; the pleasures of the imagination and of narrative are not to be found in Dr. Brownson. But he certainly will win his way to the suffrages of the higher cla.s.s of students of fine writing. And let one have any shadow of interest in the great questions he treats, and every page displays a style which is the rarest of literary gifts. The very fact that his writing is untinted by those lesser beauties which catch the eye but to impede its deepest glances, is in itself an excellence all the greater in proportion to the gravity of his topics. Absolutely free from the least obscurity, his diction is a magnetic medium uniting the master's personality, the disciple's understanding, and the essence of the subject under consideration. Cardinal Newman, some may believe, possessed this supreme rhetoric in perhaps even a higher degree than Brownson, but so much can be said of few other writers of English prose. George Ripley, whom Father Hecker deemed the best judge of literature in our country or elsewhere, a.s.sured him that there were pa.s.sages in Dr. Brownson which could not be surpa.s.sed in the whole range of English literature.

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CHAPTER XIX

YEARNINGS AFTER CONTEMPLATION

"COULD I but give up all my time to contemplation, study, reading, and reflection!"

Upon this aspiration as a background the whole matter of Isaac Hecker's vocation must be considered. In substance we have met with it very frequently already; in the shape just given it confronts us on the first page of the new diary begun a few days before his baptism. And as our reader accompanies us through the records he made during the year that still elapsed before he entered the Redemptorist Order, nothing, we think, will become more evident than that he was called to something beyond adhesion to the Church, the worthy reception of the sacraments, or even the ordinary sacerdotal state.

To make this still plainer at the start, it may be useful to describe briefly the special grounds whereon Isaac Hecker fought his life-long battles. These were, first: The validity of those natural aspirations which are called religious, and which embrace the veracity of reason in its essential affirmations. Second: Whether man be by nature guileless or totally depraved: Third, Whether religion be or be not intrinsically and primarily an elevating influence whose end is to raise men to real union with G.o.d.

To many inquirers after the true religion such preliminary doubts have been already settled, either by natural bent of mind or docility to previous training; and they pa.s.s on to consider apostolical succession, the primacy of Peter, the nature and number of the sacraments, and other matters wherein heresy errs by denial or by defect. But to Isaac Hecker all such points as these were, in a sense, subsidiary. He had asked admission into the Church because he found it to be the only teaching society on earth whose doctrines gave complete and adequate satisfaction to that fundamental craving of his nature which prompted his questions. She accredited herself to him as fully by that fact as she must have done to many a philosophic pagan among those who were the first disciples to the new faith preached by St. John or St. Paul. All else he accepted with an implicit, child-like confidence not different from that which moves the loyal descendant of ages of Catholic ancestors. It was clear to him that these accompanying doctrines and inst.i.tutions must have been enfolded within the original germ, and must be received on the same authority, not by an a.n.a.lytic process and on their merits, one by one.

What he wanted was, in the first place, sustenance for what he invariably calls "the life" given him; and next, light to see in what way he was to put to use the strength so gained. The first effect of the sacraments was what one might call the natural one of making more visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating his instinctive efforts to pierce through them. After the rapturous joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation and dryness heavier than he had ever known at once set in. Perhaps he had expected the very reverse of this. At all events, it was not many days before it drew from him the complaint that in leaving Concord he had also left behind him the great interior sweetness which had buoyed him up. On August 11 he writes:

"How hard it has been for me to go through with all these solemn mysteries and ceremonies without experiencing any of those great delights which I have [before] felt. Why is this? Is it to try my faith? O Lord! how long shall I be tried in this season of desolation? Are these [delights] never to return? Have I acted unworthily? What shall I do to receive these blessings again?"

Then he resolves to make a novena, fasting the while on bread and water, to entreat their renewal. But at once a better mood sets in and he adds:

"The highest state of perfection is to be content to be nothing.

Lord, give me strength not to ask of Thee anything that is pleasant to me. I renounce what I have just asked for, and will try to do all without the hope of recompense. If Thou triest my soul, let it not go until it has paid the uttermost farthing."

"August 15, 1844.--To-day is the holyday of the a.s.sumption of the dear, Blessed Mary, Mother of our Lord and Saviour Jesus. Oh! may I be found worthy of her regard and love."

"He that has not learned the bitterness of the drops of woe has not learned to live. One hour of deep agony teaches man more love and wisdom than a whole long life of happiness. . .

"In many faces I see pa.s.sing through the crowded streets there seems a veiled beauty, an angel quickening me with purer life as I go by them in anxious haste. Do we not see the hidden worth, glory, and beauty of others as our own becomes revealed to us? Would the Son of G.o.d have been needed to ransom man if he were not of incomparable value?"

One of the dreams that at this time occupied Isaac's mind was that of undertaking a pilgrimage to Rome. He wrote to Henry Th.o.r.eau, proposing that they should go in company, and felt regret when his invitation was not accepted. His notion was to "work, beg, and travel on foot, so far as land goes, to Rome. I know of no pleasanter, better way, both for soul and body, than to make such a pilgrimage in the old, middle-age fashion; to suffer hunger, storm, cold, heat--all that can affect the body of flesh. If we receive hard usage, so much the better will it be for us. Why thump one's own flesh here? Let it be done for us by others, our soul, meanwhile, looking at higher objects. . . . I feel that I have the stuff to do it in me. I would love to work and beg my way to Rome if it cost me ten or fifteen years of my life."

Th.o.r.eau replied to this proposal that such a tour had been one of his own early dreams, but that he had outlived it. He had now "retired from all external activity in disgust, and his life was more Brahminical, Artesian-well, Inner-Temple like." So the scheme, which had secured Bishop McCloskey's approbation, although he had forcibly represented to young Hecker that to go absolutely dest.i.tute of money, and dependent for all things upon alms, would be impossible, was presently shelved. It was but one of the diversions with which certain souls, not yet enlightened as to their true course, nor arrived at the abandonment of themselves to Divine Providence, are amused. Their inactivity seems idleness to them, and they mistake the restless impulse which bids them be up and doing for the voice of conscience or the inspiration of heavenly wisdom; but it is neither.

Sometimes it is a superfluity of natural energy seeking an outlet; sometimes it is the result of the strain placed upon nature by a very powerful influx of grace. The infusion of power from above is often greatly in excess of the light necessary for guidance in its use.

This last rarely comes entirely from the inner touch of the Holy Spirit. In the lives of the Fathers of the Desert we read of a certain young brother, Ptolemy, who went astray from sound spirituality. When admonished he a.s.serted that he need learn the spiritual life from none save the Holy Ghost, of whose inspirations any man of good will could be certain. He was told by the old monks that the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and the understanding of the same are two distinct things, and that this understanding is disclosed only to him whose will has been purified by the practice of obedience and humility. In truth, it is rarely that the inner voice of G.o.d does not call for an external interpreter, which, if it does no more than furnish a divinely authorized test and criterion, is none the less necessary. Moreover, the inner voice seldom provides ways and means for its own purposes. Father Hecker was ever a strenuous defender of this inner and outer unity of the Divine guidance, and his vocation was an ill.u.s.tration of it. However masterful the inner voice of G.o.d which called him away from the world, he was helpless till he heard its tones harmonized by the counsel of Bishop McCloskey. When he found that even with this backing secured, the external obstacles to his plan proved invincible, he was once more nonplussed. "If not this, what?" he asks himself.

"I feel deeply and strongly that the circle of family happiness is not sufficient for my nature, but what I can profitably do outside of this I have not the ability to say.