Life of Father Hecker

sively affecting. The altar-piece represented Christ's rising from the tomb, and this was the subject-matter of the priest's sermon. In the m

her but I feel an awe, an invisible influence, which strikes me mute. I would sit in silence, covering my head. A sanctified atmosphere seems to fill the place and to penetrate my soul when I enter, as if I were in a holy temple. 'Thou standest in a holy place,' I would say. A lo

, or that what it has is not that for which my soul is aching. I know it can be said in reply that I cannot know what the Church has until I am in communion with it; that it satisfies natures greater than mine; that it is the true life of the world; that there is no true spirituality outside of it, and that before I can judge it right

ism and form, it is in the Catholic Church, and our business will be to stop this controversy and call an Ecum

inal paragraph which clamored for quotation. B

praying, the thought flashed across my mind, Where is God? Is He not here? Why prayest thou as if He were at a great distance from thee? Think of it.

could we but understand that the kingdom of heaven is always at hand to the discerner, and that God calls u

ics at which Mr. Curtis says Isaac used to "look in," hoping to "find an answer to his questions." Such speculations are a trait throughout the diary, though they are everywhere subordinate to the practical ends w

and that faith responds to my soul in its religious aspirations and its longings. I have not wished to make myself Catholic, but that answers on all sides to the wants of my soul. It is so rich, so full. One is in har

one little in study, but feel that I have lived very much." What hinders him he supposes to be "contemplating any certain amount of study which I ought to accomplish

s not the great object of life. I am now out of it in the common meaning. I am not subject to its ordinances. Is it not best for me to accep

ul, Protestantism; John, what is to be. The statement struck me and responded to my own dim intuitions. Catholicism is solidarity; Protestantism is individuality. What we want, and are tending to, is what shall unite them both, as John's spirit does-and that

erence: He so exalts and purifies us that our subject becomes the power to see. The telescope is a medium through which the boundaries of our vi

orld to himself not subjectively but truly objectively. . . . Every individual ought, perhaps, to be satisfied with his own character. For it is an important truth of Fourier's that attractions are in proport

Jesus Christ.' The effect of the fall was literally the knowledge of good and evil. God knows no evil, and when we become one with Him, through the Mediator, we shall regain our previous state. Knowledge is the effect of sin, and is perhaps destined to correct itself. Consciousness and knowledge go together. Spontaneity and life are one. Knowledge is no gain, for i

assions. This is one statement. Another would be this: all these things can and should be enjoyed, but in a higher, purer, more exalted state of being than is the present ordin

ld feel that some one lived in the same world that I now do. Something cloudy separates us. I cannot speak from my real being to others. There is no mutual recognition. When I speak, it is as if a burden accumulated round

Brownson preach, and a day or two later made the subjoin

s, we may do what we could not be excused for doing otherwise. And he thinks by proclaiming the Catholic faith and repudiating the attempt to build up a Church, that in time the Protestant world will become Catholic in its dispositions, so that a unity will be made without submiss

one can believe in either one of those propositions, as 0. A. B. does, without becoming a Catholic in fact, I cannot conceive. This special pleading of exceptions, the necessity of the case, and improbable suppositions, springs more, I think, from the position of the individual than from the importance or truth of the arguments made use of. Therefore I think

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