Life of Father Hecker Part 20

He was endeavoring at this time to retrench his hours of sleep to the narrowest dimensions compatible with health, and found it, we may note, the most difficult of his austerities. In other respects they remained severe, as this entry may witness:

"November 27, 1844.--I am sorely perplexed what to eat. Nuts, apples, and bread seem not a diet wholly suitable, and what to add I know not. Potatoes are not good; I think they were the cause of my illness last week. I do not wish to partake of anything that comes even remotely from an animal. Cooking, also, I wish, as far as possible, to dispense with. I would I could dispense with the whole digestive apparatus! Cheese, b.u.t.ter, eggs, milk, are for many reasons not a part of my diet."

The balance of this fourth volume of his diary, begun September 9, 1844, and ended January 2, 1845, is mainly occupied with addresses to his guardian angel. He was, as those who knew him will remember, always extremely devout to the angelic choirs. On his birthday this year he writes as follows:

"December 18, 1844.--Let me look back for a few moments and see where I stood last year this time (an incomprehensible length), and where I now stand. Then my path was dim, unfixed, unsettled. Then I was not so disentangled from the body and its desires as, I hope in G.o.d, I now am. In all I feel a consciousness that since then I have spiritually grown--been transformed. For my present I cannot speak.

For my future, it seems I dare not speak.

"Dreams of the future! Exalted visions! Beautiful, unspeakable hopes!

Deep, inarticulate longings that fill the conscious soul! Ah! so sweet, so harmonious, so delightful, like an angel, like the bride of the pure and bright soul adorned for the nuptials, do I see the future beckoning me with a clear, transparent smile onward to her presence. 'Ah!' my soul would say, 'we will meet, for I am in thy presence, and faithful in G.o.d may heaven grant me to be.' The beauty, the grace, the love, the sweetness that attract me, are beyond all comparison. Ah! thou eternal, ever-blooming virgin, the Future, shall I ever embrace thee? Shall I ever see thee nearer to my heart? I look at myself and I am bowed down low in grief; but when I cast my eyes up to thee, in seeing thee I am lost. The grace and beauty I see in thee pa.s.ses into my soul, and I am all that thou art. I am then wedded to thee, and I would that it were an eternal union. But ah! my eyes, when turned upon myself, lose all sight of thee, and meet nothing but my own spots and blemishes. How canst thou love me? I say; and for thy pure love I am melted into thee as one."

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 G.o.d. . . . Lord, I am Thine, for Thou dost teach me this be Thy unutterable, ever-present love."

"January 3.--Last Sat.u.r.day my confessor was not at home when I called. I have waited until this morning, the Sat.u.r.day 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.bler than thyself if thou wouldst be enn.o.bled, 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 beat.i.tude 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."

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 G.o.d, invocations of the Blessed Virgin, St. Francis of a.s.sisi 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 a.s.sured him that his antic.i.p.ations 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 compa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume 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 cla.s.ses at Cornelius Inst.i.tute, 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."

As may be supposed, his visits to Third Street became frequent, and his acquaintance with the Fathers better established. This was especially true with regard to Father Rumpler, who was rector of the house, a learned and able man and one of mature spirituality. He was a German born and bred, with the hard ideas of discipline peculiar to a cla.s.s of his countrymen though foreign to the genuine German character. He impressed young Hecker as a sedate man, wise and firm.

The friendship then begun was maintained until Father Rumpler was deprived of his reason by an attack of acute mania several years later. But more than the friendship of Rumpler, as far as immediate results were concerned, was the providential circ.u.mstance of two other young Americans having applied to join the Redemptorists. To Isaac this was a stimulant of no ordinary power. Like himself, they were converts and very fervent ones; but, unlike him, they had come into the Church from Episcopalianism. Clarence A. Walworth, son of the Chancellor of the State of New York, was a graduate of Union College. He studied law in Albany and practised his profession for a short time, but finally undertook the ministry. After three years in the Episcopal seminary he became a Catholic. Those who know him now can see the tall and graceful youth, pleasing and kindly, with the face and voice and soul of an orator; for the force and charm of youth have not been weakened in receiving the dignity of old age.

James A. McMaster was of Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish parentage. His name is familiar to our readers as editor of the _Freeman's Journal._ Those qualities of aggressive zeal which made McMaster so well known to Catholics of our day were not wholly undeveloped in the tall, angular youth, still a catechumen, and intoxicated with the new wine of Catholic fervor. Young Mr. Walworth had been made a Catholic but a short time before, and McMaster was received into the Church by the Redemptorists in Third Street, his two young friends being present.

While he was kneeling at the altar, candle in hand, piously reading his profession of faith to Father Rumpler, he accidentally set fire to Father Tschenhens' hair, one of the fathers a.s.sisting at the ceremony. Walking together afterwards in the little garden of the convent, Father Rumpler said to him: "Mr. McMaster, you begin well--setting fire to a priest." "Oh," answered he, "if I don't set fire to something more than that it will be a pity." These new friends of Isaac had applied to enter the Redemptorist novitiate and they had been accepted. This meant a voyage to Europe, for the congregation had not yet established a novitiate in America.

One Friday, then, during the last days of July--the exact date we have not been able to discover--Isaac Hecker was informed by Father Rumpler that Walworth and McMaster would sail for Belgium the evening of the next day. "I decided to join them," he said when relating the circ.u.mstances afterwards. "Father Rumpler was favorable, but puzzled.

And I must first present myself to the Provincial, Father de Held, who was in Baltimore. I arrived in Baltimore at four o'clock in the morning on Sat.u.r.day, travelling all night. Father de Held looked at me, as I presented myself, and said that he must take time to consider. I explained about the departure of the others that day. He ordered Brother Michael to get me a bowl of coffee from the kitchen, and me to hear his Ma.s.s. I heard the Ma.s.s and after that he examined me a little--asked me to read out of the _Following of Christ_ in Latin, which I did. He gave me my acceptance, and I rushed back to New York by the half-past eight o'clock morning train. George had packed my trunk, and I sailed that day with the others."

The picturesqueness of the group was certainly not lessened by the accession of Isaac Hecker, whose leap to and from Baltimore, though hardly to be expected from a contemplative, was in accord with the sudden energy of his nature. One who saw him at the time says that "he had the general make-up of a transcendentalist, not excepting his long hair flowing down on his neck."

The ship was an American one named the _Argo,_ and she was bound for London. The voyage was every way pleasant, lasting but twenty-five days from land to land, with bright skies, quiet sea, and fair winds.

Their berths were in the waist of the ship, in the second cabin, all the places in the first cabin having been taken; this pleased them well, for they loved the poor man's lot. Isaac's pa.s.sage money was paid by his brothers, and he was supplied by them and his mother with all sorts of conveniences; and these, of course, he made to conduce to the comfort of the entire party. The lower and larger berth of their little state-room was occupied by Walworth and McMaster, and Isaac took the upper and smaller one. None of them suffered from sea-sickness.

The young pilgrims were overflowing with happiness, as if they were going to the enjoyment of a rich heritage, as, indeed, in a spiritual sense they were. It was a first voyage to the Old World for all of them and they found everything interesting. They made friends with the crew, who were nearly all Yankee sailors, and who struck them as exactly like themselves, except that they were not religious; and they sought entertainment with such of the pa.s.sengers as were congenial, though in this Isaac Hecker was more ready than his companions. Father Walworth tells an incident characteristic of both himself and his transcendental companion. He was admonishing young Hecker to be more reticent among the crew and was asked why. "You wouldn't like to kneel down and kiss the deck before all those sailors," said Walworth. "Why not?" was the reply. "Then do it." And down dropped Hecker to the deck and kissed it in all simplicity.

They had many topics of interest to occupy their time; Isaac favored such as were philosophical and social, his companions were absorbed by the Tractarian movement, its phases of thought and variety of persons, and all must have had much to tell of friends and relatives whom they hoped soon to see members of the Church. One night the harmony with their fellow-pa.s.sengers was threatened with rupture.

They were much annoyed by a violent dispute about the Trinity carried on in the adjoining cabin far into the night. McMaster finally lost patience, sprang out of bed, rushed among the disputants, and smote the table with a tremendous blow and shouted _"Silence!"_ His remedy was efficacious; the theologians scattered and went to bed.

There was a marked difference between Isaac and his companions in controversial views. All three used their reason with the utmost activity, but he had travelled into the Church by the road of philosophy and they by that of history and Scripture. Their conversation must have been the exchange of intellectual commodities of very different kinds and for that reason expediting a busy commerce. They could profit by his bold and original views of principle and he was in need of their idea of the external integrity of organized religion. Then, too, they had much to say of the future, chiefly by way of conjecture, for no member of the order accompanied them. No one was superior and no superior was needed. As to devotional exercises each suited himself, kneeling down and saying his prayers night and morning and at other times, in his own way and words.

There was also difference in matters of devotion, for Isaac Hecker had little or no religious training, and as to the traditional forms of religious practice he was very backward. The others had long since familiarized themselves with all Catholic usages. Young Walworth taught young Hecker how to say the rosary and initiated him, doubtless, into other common practices, which he a.s.sumed with the simplicity and docility of the child of guileless nature that he was.

The ship, as we have said, was bound to London, but our party were too impatient to wait till the end of the voyage and left her at Portsmouth in the pilot's boat; the sea was running high, but so were their spirits, and although the boat was tossed about in a way to scare a landsman, they gladly went ash.o.r.e and took the cars to London. We have before us a letter from Isaac Hecker to his brothers, dated the 29th of August, saying that they had been in London three days after a pleasant voyage, and expressing deep joy at nearing the place of retirement and prayer for which he had been longing. He asks them to write to Brownson and especially to a.s.sure his mother of his happiness.

McMaster insisted on visiting Newman at Littlemore, and afterwards gave a glowing account of his visit. He had been received by the great man, who did not enter the Church till a few months later, with the utmost kindness. He found him standing in his library, reading a book. He asked many questions about the tendency of men's minds in America, and was especially interested in Arthur Carey, with whose influence among American Episcopalians and early death the reader has been made acquainted. They lodged at a decent little inn over a pastry cook's shop and did not go sight-seeing to any extent.

McMaster's companions did not wait for his return from Oxford, but when the packet sailed for Antwerp, which was Sunday, the 30th of August, they went down to Folkestone and took pa.s.sage. They arrived the following morning, and, armed with a letter from Father Rumpler to a Madame Marchand, a warm friend of the congregation, they went straight to the nearest Church to inquire the way to her house. It happened to be the Jesuit church, and one of the fathers kindly guided them to the lady's house. She was delighted to serve them; gave them an excellent dinner, and, after they had visited Rubens'

great picture, the Descent from the Cross, set them forth on their journey; but the "yea, yea and nay, nay" of Scripture, or rather _jah, jah, nein, nein,_ was their only conversation with the good lady, for although young Walworth could speak French and Isaac German, she knew nothing but Flemish. Distances are not great in little Belgium, and so before night they were at St. Trond, a little city about thirty-five miles southeast of Antwerp and twenty miles from Liege. Here they were soon joined by Mr. McMaster, and their novitiate began. Isaac Hecker was now twenty-five years and nine months old.

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CHAPTER XXI

BROTHER HECKER

THE Redemptorist novitiate at St. Trond, as well as the house of studies at Wittem, Holland, had been established be the immediate disciples of St. Clement Hofbauer. That great servant of G.o.d had introduced the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer into Austria and other parts of Germany several years before the time of which we write. A saint himself, and of wonderful missionary gifts, he was worthy of the t.i.tle of second founder of the order of St. Alphonsus Liguori. St. Clement was the son of a Moravian peasant, and in early life had been a baker by trade. St. Alphonsus was still alive when Clement, while on a pilgrimage to Rome, was enrolled there in the Redemptorist novitiate. This event was auspicious of the future of the entire community, since his apostolate was the means of propagating the order among the northern nations, and giving to it some of its present dominant characteristics of Teutonic discipline; whereas in the land of its origin it has never fully recovered from the disasters which befell it during the lifetime of its founder. In Germany and the Low Countries, on the other hand, the children of St.