Life of Father Hecker

ernatural impressions from a very early period. It seems probable, therefore, that at least during the few years which prec

votions probably bore small resemblance to those of the ordinary religiously minded boy, either Catholic or Protestant. He has said that often at night, when lying on the shavings before the oven in the bake-house, he would start up, roused in spite of himself by some great thought, and run out upon the wharves to look at the

truth, kept nevertheless a persistent hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until it had synthetized them into a coherent whole. That was his life-long characteristic. During the years of painful ill health which preceded his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to the supernatural as if by instinct. "But I am a Saxon and cling to the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason why any innocent pleasure should not be enjo

tor, to listen to His voice in conscience, to live honestly and purely as in His sight-the heritage she transmitted to him probably contained little more than this. Like most others reared in heresy who afterwards attain to the true knowledge of the Incarnation, he had to seek for it with almost as great travail of mind as if he had been born a pagan. It cannot be too strongly insisted on, however, that his struggles were merely intellectual, and, when they began to take a definite turn, shaped themselves into the natural result of a metaphysic as repugnant to common sense as it is to Christian philosophy. To this fact, so important in certain of its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on. They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda, jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last years of his life, b

and the like. Others in whose lives the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates. In my case,

er time

y that was peculiar and remarkable. I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the time, conscious that God was

ag

ho love His coming.' I did not believe in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to be

in asserting the necessity of the supernatural for the attainment of man's destiny. How could it be otherwise, when he considered that destiny to be the elevation of man above all good merely human, and by means far beyond the compass of his natural powers? Still, this wa

ecker has himself made some interesting references to his experiences in the latter field, and upon these we shall draw heavily for ou

inciples somewhere in Western New York. From him we learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L. Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting control of political power so as to use

ions of equality; by expressing a great love for the people and a deep sympathy with the laborer, whom we represented as defrauded and oppressed by his employer; by denouncing all proprietors as aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopular features of our pla

rior aims of their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of those who followed them. Yet the genesis of the present purely secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property, and marriage was then an offence in th

on long past personal history, are fewer than we could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished. The five articles on Dr. Brownson, beginning in The Catholic World of April, 1887, and concluding in November of the same year, contain almost the only matters relativ

fort Street. In its prospectus the Democrat promises to contend for 'Equality of Rights, often trampled in the dust by Monopoly Democrats,' to battle 'with an aristocratic opposition powerful in talent and official entrenchment, and mighty in money and facilities for corruption.' 'In the course of this duty it will not fail fearl

egislation. . . . At this moment we are the only large nation on the face of the earth where the mass of the people govern in theory-where they may govern in reality, if they will-where the real taxes of government, although too heavy, are but trifling, and where a m

tical rights, and command its representatives to carry the laws abolishing primogeniture and entails one step further, and stop all devises of land and prohibit it from being an article of sale. (In a foot-note of the

ters to private banks of circulation. We condemned these as monopolies, for we were hostile to all monopolies-that is to say, to the u

o relate one of the humors of the period, so far as these brot

times every week, we smoothed out and put in a pile, and then printed on their backs a saying we took from Daniel Webster (though I believe it was not quite authentic): 'Of all the contrivances to impoverish the laboring classes of mankind, paper money is the most effective. It fertilizes the rich

when Brownson was invited to lecture in New York in favor of the principles and aims of this party. Isaac was then in

ts editor; its motto was, 'The world is governed too much'-a motto in whose spirit there could be no great movement except in the way of revolution. A

ive reality of the operations of my soul?' He answered: 'If you have not

of the testimony of my own faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence. I had begun my

Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to lecture before

the philosophy that leads men to trust in a supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man who does not look to the hope of a future state of beatitude for the chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end. If a man does not seek beatitude in God he seeks it in himself and his fellow-men-in the highest earthly developm

aid, 'Be not anxious as to what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed; for after all these things do the heathen seek.' I gave Him a flat denial, and said, Be anxious; labor especially for these things, first for yourselves, then for others. Enlarging, however, my views a little, I said, Man's end for which he is to

Whig party, it received no great attention from us. At that time its chances of getting control of this State or of the United States were remote. Our biggest fight was against the 'usages of the party' as in vogue in the so-called regular Democracy embodied in the Tammany Hall party. This organization undertook to absorb us when we had grown too powerful to be ignored. They nominated a legislative ticket made up half of their men and half of ours. This move was to a great extent successful; but many of us who were purists

. He delivered his first course of lectures in the old Stuyvesant Institute in Broadway, facing Bond Street-the same hall used a little afterwards by the Unitarian Society while they were building a church for Mr. Dewey in Broadway opposite Eighth Street, the very same society now established in Lexington Avenue, with Mr. Collyer as minister. The subsequent courses were delivered in Clinton Hall, corner of Nassau and Beekman, the site now occupied by one of our modern mammoth buildings. I forget how much we were c

s indeed a majestic man, displaying in his demeanor the power of a mind altogether above the ordinary. But he was essentially a philosopher, and that means that he could never be what is called popular. He was an interesting speaker, but he never sought popularity. He never seemed to care much about the reception his words received, but he exhibited anxiety to get his thoughts rightly expressed and to leave no doubt about what his convictions were. Yet among a limited class of m

cal. He had given up preaching for some years, and embarked on the stormy waves of social politics, and had by his writings become an expositor of various theories of social reform, chiefly those of French origin. So that the dominant note of his lectures was not by any means religious, but political. He was at that time considered as identified with the Workingman's party, and came to New York to speak as one of our leaders. The general trend of his lectures was the philosophy of history as it bears on questions of social reform. At bottom hi

of the Democratic side of civilization. For His person and office he and all of us had a profound appreciation and sympathy, but it was not reverential or religious; the religious side of Christ's mission was ignored. Christ was

fteen, while the reform lecturer was in his early thirties. But the boy who began at once, as he has told us, to put philosophical questions, and to seek a test whereby to determine the validity of his mental processes, was already well known to the vot

nd hence views are taken for what they seem to be worth rather than out of respect for the source they spring from. Imagine, then, this tall, fair, strong-faced boy of fourteen, mounted, perhaps, on one of his own flour-barrels, dogmatizing the principles of social democracy, posing as a spontaneous political reformer before a crowded street full of men twice and thrice his years, but bound together with him by the sympathies common to the wage-earning classes. It is true that Isaac Hecker and his brothers, of whom the eldest had but recently attained to the dignity of a voter, although still poor and hard-working, had already, by virtue of sheer industry and pluck, passed over to the class of wage-payers. But they were not less ardent reformers after than before that transition. Isaac at all events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen of New York

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