THE TURNING-POINT
A BRIEF consideration at this point of a certain permanent tendency
of Father Hecker's mind will be of present and future value to the
student of his life. It has been said already that he never changed
the principles he had adopted as a lad among the apprentices and
journeymen of New York; principles which, for all social politics, he
summarized in the homely expression, "I am always for the under dog."
Thus, in the article quoted in the preceding chapter, he had the
right to say of himself and his associates:
"We were guileless men absorbed in seeking a solution for the
problems of life. Nor, as social reformers at least, were we given
over to theories altogether wrong. The constant recurrence of similar
epochs of social agitation since then, and the present enormous
development of the monopolies which we resisted in their very
infancy, show that our forecast of the future was not wholly
visionary. The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present
moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and
such as was then within the easy reach of State and national
authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at
this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order."
We dwell on his political consistency, however, only because it
affords an evidence of that unity of character which was always
recognized in Father Hecker by those who knew him best. Change in
him, in whatever direction it seemed to proceed, meant primarily the
dropping off of accidental excrescences. There was nothing radical in
it. What he once held with the settled allegiance of his intelligence
he held always, adding to or developing it further as fast as the
clouds were blown away from his mental horizon. From the standpoint
of personal experience he could fairly criticise, as he did in
conversation some few years before his death, Cardinal Newman's
dictum that "conversion is a leap in the dark." "I say," he went on,
"that it is a leap in the light." _"Into_ the light, but through the
dark," was suggested in reply.
"No," he answered. "If one arrives at a recognition of the truth of
Catholic doctrine through one or other form of Protestant orthodoxy,
then the difficulties of ordinary controversy will indeed leave him
to the very end in the dark. But if he comes to the Church through
the working and the results of natural reason, it is light all the
way, and to the very end. I had this out with Cardinal Newman
personally, and he agreed that I was right."
It is true that his views were rectified when he entered the Church,
and that when once in it he was ever acquiring new truth and new
views of truth. But his character never changed. He was a luminous
example of the truth of the saying that the child is father to the
man, so often apparently falsified by experience. Boy and man, the
prominent characteristic of his mind was a clear perception of
fundamentals and a disregard of non-essentials in the whole domain of
life. To reverse a familiar maxim, "Take care of the dollars and the
cents will take care of themselves," might describe his plan of
mental economy. To the small coin of discussion in any field of
inquiry he paid little attention. One who knew him many years has
often heard him say, "Emphasize the universal always."
He was a teacher by natural vocation. No sooner was he satisfied that
he knew anything of general moment than he felt pressed to impart his
knowledge. Contact with him could never be simply for acquaintance'
sake; still less for an idle comparison of views. While no man could
be more frank in the admission of a lack of data on which to base an
opinion in matters of fact, or a lack of illumination on affairs of
conduct or practical direction, when such existed, yet to be certain
was, to him, the self-luminous guarantee of his mission to instruct.
But until that certainty was attained, in a manner satisfactory to
both the intellectual and the ethical sides of his nature, he was
silent.
As a priest, though he undertook to teach anybody and everybody, yet
he could seldom have given the impression of desiring to impose his
personal views, simply as such. His vital perception that there can
be nothing private in truth shone through his speech too plainly for
so gross a misconception to be easily made by candid minds. The fact
is that the community of spiritual goods was vividly realized by him,
and in good faith he credited all men with a longing like his own to
see things as they really are. As he had by nature a very kindly
manner, benignant and cheerful, the average man readily submitted to
his influence. In his prime he was always a most successful and
popular preacher and lecturer, from the combined effect of this
earnestness of conviction and his personal magnetic quality. Men
whose mental characteristics resembled his became, soon or late, his
enthusiastic disciples, and as to others, although at first some were
inclined to suspect him, many of them ended by becoming his warm
friends.
It is in this light that we must view the precocious efforts of the
young politician. Nothing was further from his thoughts at any time
than to employ politics as a means to any private end. Although we
have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand
some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and
enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made
solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of
self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature--a Stoic,
not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader
will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of
Father Hecker's interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even
here without explaining that we use the word ascetic in its proper
sense, to connote the rightful dominance of reason over appetite, the
supremacy of the higher over the lower; not the jurisdiction of the
judge over the criminal. In his case, during the greater part of his
life, the adjustment of the higher and lower, the restraint he placed
upon the beast in view of the elevation due to the man, was neither
conceived nor felt as punitive. We shall see later on how God finally
subjected him to a discipline so corrective as to be acknowledged by
him as judicial.
Isaac Hecker threw himself into public questions, then, because,
being a workman, he believed he saw ways by which the working classes
might be morally and socially elevated. He wanted for his class what
he wanted for himself. To get his views into shape, to press them
with all his force whenever and wherever an opportunity presented
itself, was for him the inescapable consequence of that belief. Like
his great patron, St. Paul, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" was
always his first question after his own illumination had been
granted. There is a note in the collection of private memoranda that
has been preserved, in which, alluding to the painful struggles which
preceded his clear recognition that the doctrines of the Catholic
Church afforded the adequate solution of all his difficulties, he
says that his interior sufferings were so great that the question
with him was "whether I should drown myself in the river or drown my
longings and doubts in a career of wild ambition." Still, to those
who knew him well, it is impossible to think of him as ever capable
of any ambition which had not an end commensurate with mankind
itself. To elevate men, to go up with them, not above them, was, from
first to last, the scope of his desire. The nature of his
surroundings in youth, his personal experience of the hardships of
the poorer classes, his intercourse with radical socialists, together
with the incomplete character of the religious training given him,
made him at first look on politics as a possible and probable means
to this desirable end. But he was too sensibly impelled by the Divine
impulse toward personal perfection, and too inflexibly honest with
himself, not to come early to a thorough realization, on one hand of
the fact that man cannot, unaided, rise above his natural level, and,
on the other, that no conceivable amelioration of merely social
conditions could satisfy his aspirations. And if not his, how those
of other men?
One thing that becomes evident in studying this period of Isaac
Hecker's life is the fact that his acquaintance with Dr. Brownson
marks a turning-point in his views, his opinions, his whole attitude
of mind toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then the Saviour of men
had been represented to him exclusively as a remedy against the fear
of hell; His use seemed to be to furnish a Divine point to which men
might work themselves up by an emotional process resulting in an
assurance of forgiveness of sin and a secure hope of heaven.
Christianity, that is to say, had been presented to him under the
form of Methodism. The result had been what might have been
anticipated in a nature so averse to emotional excitement and
possessing so little consciousness of actual sin. Drawn to God as he
had always been by love and aspiration, he was not as yet sensible of
any gulf which needed to be bridged between him and his Creator;
hence, to present Christ solely as the Victim, the Expiatory
Sacrifice demanded by Divine Justice, was to make Him, if not
impossible, yet premature to a person like him. Meantime, what he saw
and heard all around him, poverty, inequality, greed, shiftlessness,
low views of life, ceaseless and poorly remunerated toil, made
incessant demands upon him. These things he knew by actual contact,
by physical, mental, and moral experience, as a man knows by touch
and taste and smell. Men's sufferings, longings, struggles,
disappointments had been early thrust upon him as a personal and most
weighty burden; and the only relief yet offered was the Christ of
emotional Methodism. To a nature more open to temptation on its lower
side, and hence more conscious of its radical limitations, even this
defective presentation of the Redeemer of men might have appealed
profoundly. But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly
social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained
until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an
extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart
from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The
validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of
Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it
has from the beginning most vehemently rejected. As a negative force
its essence is a protest against organic Christianity. As a positive
force it is simply men, taken one by one, dealing separately with God
concerning matters strictly personal. True, it is a fundamental
verity that men must deal individually with God; but the external
test that their dealings with Him have been efficacious, and their
inspirations valid, is furnished by the fact of their incorporation
into the organic life of Christendom. As St. Paul expresses it: "For
as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the
body, whereas they are many, are yet one body, so also is Christ. For
in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or
Gentiles, whether bond or free, and in one Spirit have we all been
made to drink."*
[* I Cor. 12:12, 13.]
It is plain, then, that a religion such as Protestantism, which is
unsocial and disintegrating by virtue of its antagonistic forces, can
contribute little to the solution of social problems. Even when not
actively rejected by men deeply interested in such problems, it is
tolerably sure that it will be practically ignored as a working
factor in their public relations with their fellows. Religion will
remain the narrowly personal matter it began; chiefly an affair for
Sundays; best attended to in one's pew in church or at the family
altar. Probably it may reach the shop, the counter, and the scales;
not so certainly the factory, the mine, the political platform, and
the ballot. If Christianity had never presented itself under any
other aspect than this to Isaac Hecker, it is certain that it would
never have obtained his allegiance. Yet it is equally certain that he
never rejected Christ under any aspect in which He was presented to
him.
Even concerning the period of his life with which we are now engaged,
and in which we have already represented him as having lost hold of
all distinctively Christian doctrines, we must emphasize the precise
words we have employed. He "lost hold"; that was because his original
grasp was weak. While no authoritative dogmatic teaching had given
him an even approximately full and definite idea of the God-man, His
personality, His character, and His mission, the fragmentary truths
offered him had made His influence seem restrictive rather than
liberative of human energies. Yet even so he had not deliberately
turned his back upon Him, though his tendency at this time was
doubtless toward simple Theism. He had begun to ignore Christianity,
simply because his own problems were dominantly social, and orthodox
Protestantism, the only form of religion which he knew, had no social
force corresponding to its pretensions and demands.
Now, upon this state of mind the teaching of Dr. Brownson came like
seed upon a fallow soil. Like that which preceded it, it erred rather
by defect than by actual or, at any rate, by wilful deviation from
true doctrine. Isaac Hecker met for the first time in Orestes
Brownson an exponent of Jesus Christ as the great Benefactor and
Uplifter of the human race in this present life. Dr. Brownson has
himself given a statement of the views which he held and inculcated
between 1834 and 1843--which includes the period we are at present
considering--and it is so brief and to the point that we cannot do
better than to quote it:
"I found in me," he writes (_The Convert,_p. 111), "certain religious
sentiments that I could not efface; certain religious beliefs or
tendencies, of which I could not divest myself. I regarded them as a
law of my nature, as natural to man, as the noblest part of our
nature, and as such I cherished them; _but as the expression in me of
an objective world, I seldom pondered them._ I found them universal,
manifesting themselves, in some form, wherever man is found; but I
received them, _or supposed I received them,_ on the authority of
humanity or human nature, and professed to hold no religion except
that of humanity. I had become a believer in humanity, and put
humanity in the place of God. The only God I recognized was the
divine in man, the divinity of humanity, one alike with God and with
man, which I supposed to be the real meaning of the Christian
doctrine of the Incarnation, the mystery of Emmanuel, or God with
us--God manifest in the flesh. There may be an unmanifested God, and
certainly is; but the only God who exists for us is the God in man,
the active and living principle of human nature.
"I regarded Jesus Christ as divine in the sense in which all men are
divine, and human in the sense in which all men are human. I took him
as my model man, and regarded him as a moral and social reformer, who
sought, by teaching the truth under a religious envelope, and
practising the highest and purest morality, to meliorate the earthly
condition of mankind; but I saw nothing miraculous in his conception
or birth, nothing supernatural in his person or character, in his
life or doctrine. He came to redeem the world, as does every great
and good man, and deserved to be held in universal honor and esteem
as one who remained firm to the truth amid every trial, and finally
died on the cross, a martyr to his love of mankind. As a social
reformer, as one devoted to the progress and well-being of man in
this world, I thought I might liken myself to him and call myself by
his name. I called myself a Christian, not because I took him for my
master, not because I believed all he believed or taught, but
because, like him, I was laboring to introduce a new order of things,
and to promote the happiness of my kind. I used the Bible as a good
Protestant, took what could be accommodated to my purpose, and passed
over the rest, as belonging to an age now happily outgrown. I
followed the example of the carnal Jews, and gave an earthly sense to
all the promises and prophecies of the Messias, and looked for my
reward in this world."
The passages we have italicized in this extract may go to show how
far Dr. Brownson himself was, at this period, from being able to give
any but the evasive answer he actually did give to the searching
philosophical questions put by his youthful admirer. But it is not
easy, especially in the light of Isaac Hecker's subsequent
experiences, to overestimate the influence which this new
presentation of our Saviour had upon the development of his mind and
character. For reasons which we have tried to indicate by a brief
description of some of his life-long interior traits, the ordinary
Protestant view, restricted and narrow, which represents Jesus Christ
merely as the appointed though voluntary Victim of the Divine wrath
against sin, had been pressed upon him prematurely. Now He was held
up to him, and by a man who was in many ways superior to all other
men the boy had met, as a great personality, altogether human,
indeed, but still the most perfect specimen of the race; the
supremely worshipful figure of all history, whose life had been given
to the assertion of the dignity of man and the equality of mankind.
That human nature is good and that men are brethren, said Dr.
Brownson, was the thesis of Christ, taught throughout His life,
sealed by His death. The Name which is above all names became thus in
a new sense a watchword, and the Gospels a treasury for that social
apostolate to which Isaac Hecker had already devoted himself with an
earnestness which for some years made it seem religion enough for him.
So it has seemed before his time and since to many a benevolent
dreamer. Though the rites of the humanitarian cult differ with its
different priests, its creed retains everywhere and always its narrow
identity. But that all men are good, or would be so save for the
unequal pressure of social conditions on them, is a conclusion which
does not follow from the single premise that human nature, inasmuch
as it is a nature and from the hand of God, is essentially good. The
world is flooded, just at present, with schemes for insuring the
perfection and happiness of men by removing so far as possible all
restraints upon their natural freedom; and whether this is to be
accomplished with Tolstoï, by reducing wants to a minimum and
abolishing money; or by establishing clubs for the promotion of
culture and organizing a social army which shall destroy poverty by
making money plenty, appears a mere matter of detail--at all events
to dreamers and to novelists. But to men who are in hard earnest with
themselves, men who "have not taken their souls in vain nor sworn
deceitfully," either to their neighbor or about him, certain other
truths concerning human nature besides that of its essential goodness
are sure to make themselves evident, soon or late. And among these is
that of its radical insufficiency to its own needs. It is a rational
nature, and it seeks the Supreme Reason, if only for its own
self-explication. It is a nature which, wherever found, is found in
the attitude of adoration, and neither in the individual man nor in
humanity at large is there any Divinity which responds to worship.
It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker's appreciation of this
truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a
tolerable approximation to the time. He went to Brook Farm in
January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting
with Dr. Brownson. It was by the advice of the latter that he made
this first decisive break from his former life. From the time when
their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of
philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his
energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social
politics. We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with
Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ fastened up on the wall before him,
so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor. Fichte and
Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philosophers whose mother-tongue
was likewise his own, and whose combined influence put him farther
off than ever from the solution of that fundamental doubt which
constantly grew more perplexing and more painful. We find him hiring
a seat in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, where Orville Dewey
was then preaching, and walking every Sunday a distance of three
miles from the foot of Rutgers Street, "because he was a smart
fellow, and I enjoyed listening to him. Did I believe in
Unitarianism? _No! I believed in nothing."_
His active participation in local politics did not continue
throughout all these years. His belief in candidates and parties as
instruments to be relied on for social purification received a final
blow very early--possibly before he was entitled to cast a vote. The
Workingmen had made a strong ticket one year, and there seemed every
probability of their carrying it. But on the eve of the election half
of their candidates sold out to one of the opposing parties. What
other results this treachery may have had is a question which,
fortunately, does not concern us, but it dispelled one of the
strongest of Isaac Hecker's youthful illusions. He continued,
nevertheless, to prove the sincerity with which his views on social
questions were held, by doing all that lay in his power to better the
condition of the men in the employment of his brothers and himself.
After he passed his majority his interest in the business declined
rapidly, and it is impossible to doubt that one of the chief reasons
why it did so is to be sought in his changing convictions as to the
manner in which business in general should be carried on.
Although in accepting Christ as his master and model he had as yet no
belief in Him as more than the most perfect of human beings, yet,
even so, Isaac Hecker's sincerity and simplicity were too great to
permit him to follow his leader at a purely conventional distance.
"Do you know," he said long afterwards, "the thought that first
loosened me from the life I led? How can I love my fellow-men and yet
get rich by the sweat of their brows? I couldn't do it. You are not a
Christian, and can't call yourself one, I said to myself, if you do
that. The heathenish selfishness of business competition started me
away from the world."
If he had received a Catholic training, Isaac Hecker would soon have
recognized that he was being drawn toward the practice of that
counsel of perfection which St. Paul embodies to St. Timothy in the
words: "Having food and wherewith to be covered, with these we are
content."* Could he have sought at this time the advice of one
familiar with internal ways, he must have been cautioned against that
first error to which those so drawn are liable, of supposing that
this call is common and imperative, and can never fail to be heard
without some more or less wilful closing of the ears. Though the
Hecker brothers were, and ever continued to be, men of the highest
business integrity, and though there existed between them a cordial
affection, which was intensified to an extraordinary degree in the
case of George and Isaac, yet the unfitness of the latter for
ordinary trade grew increasingly evident, and to himself painfully
so. The truth is, that his ideas of conducting business would have
led to the distribution of profits rather than to their accumulation.
If he could make the bake-house and the shop into a school for the
attainment of an ideal that had begun to hover, half-veiled, in the
air above him, he saw his way to staying where he was; but not
otherwise.
[* I Timothy 6:8.]
In the autumn of 1842 there came upon him certain singular
intensifications of this disquiet with himself and his surroundings.
In the journal begun the following spring, he so frequently and so
explicitly refers to these occurrences, now speaking of them as
"dreams which had a great effect upon my character"; and again,
specializing and fully describing one, as something not dreamed, but
seen when awake, "which left an indelible impression my mind,"
weaning it at once and for ever from all possibility of natural love
and marriage, that the integrity of any narrative of his life would
demand some recognition of them. His own comment, in the diary, will
not be without interest and value, both as bearing on much that
follows, and as containing all that need be said in explanation of
the present reference to such experiences:
"April 24, 1843.--. . . How can I doubt these things? Say what may
be said, still they have to me a reality, a practical good bearing on
my life. They are impressive instructors, whose teachings are given
in such a real manner that they influence me whether I would or not.
Real pictures of the future, as actual, nay, more so than my present
activity. If I should not follow them I am altogether to blame. I can
have no such adviser upon earth; none could impress me so strongly,
with such peculiar effect, and at the precise time most needed. Where
my natural strength is not enough, I find there comes foreign aid to
my assistance. Is the Lord instructing me for anything? I had, six
months ago, three or more dreams which had a very great effect upon
my character; they changed it. They were the embodiment of my present
in a great degree. Last evening's was a warning embodiment of a false
activity and its consequence, which will preserve me, under God's
assistance, from falling. . . . I see by it where I am; it has made
me purer."
In addition to these peculiar visitations, and very probably in
consequence of them, Isaac's inward anxieties culminated in prolonged
fits of nervous depression, and at last in repeated attacks of
illness which baffled the medical skill called to his assistance.
Towards Christmas he went to Chelsea to visit Brownson, to whom he
partially revealed the state of obscurity and distress in which he
found himself. Brownson, who had been one of the original promoters
of the experiment in practical sociology at West Roxbury, advised a
residence at Brook Farm as likely to afford the young man the leisure
and opportunities for study which he needed in order to come to a
full understanding with himself. He wrote to George Ripley in his
behalf and later undertook to reconcile the Hecker household with
Isaac's determination to go thither.
It was during his stay at Chelsea that Isaac first began plainly to
acquaint his family with the fact that his departure meant something
more important than the moderately prolonged change of scene and
circumstances which they had recognized as essential to his health.
We shall make abundant extracts from the letters which begin at this
date, convinced that his own words will not only afford the best
evidence of the strength of the interior pressure on him, but will
show also its unique and constant bent.
Our purpose is to show, in the most explicit manner possible, first,
how irresistibly he was impelled toward the celibate life and the
practice of poverty; and second, that in yielding to this impulse, he
was also drawn away from his former view of our Saviour, as simply
the perfect man, to the full acceptance of the supernatural truth
that He is the Incarnate God.
It is at this period of Father Hecker's life that we first meet with
a positive interference of an extraordinary kind in the plans and
purposes of his life. Many men who have outlived them, and settled
down into respectable but in nowise notable members of society, have
felt vague longings and indefinite aspirations toward a good beyond
nature during the "Storm and Stress" period of their youth. The
record of their mental struggles gets into literature with
comparative frequency, and sometimes becomes famous. It has always a
certain value, if merely as contributing to psychological science;
but in any particular instance is of passing interest only, unless it
can be shown to have been instrumental in shaping the subsequent
career. The latter was the case with Father Hecker. The extraordinary
influences already mentioned continued to dominate his intelligence
and his will, sometimes with, oftener without, explicit assignment of
any cause. It is plain enough that, up to the time when they began,
he had looked forward to such a future of domestic happiness as
honest young fellows in his position commonly desire. "He was the
life of the family circle," says one who knew the Hecker household
intimately; "he loved his people, and was loved by them with great
intensity, and his going away must have been most painful to him as
well as to them."
On this point the memoranda, so often to be referred to, contain some
words of his own to the same purport. They were spoken early in 1882:
"You know I had to leave my business--a good business it was getting
to be, too. I tell you, it was agony to give everything up--friends,
prospects in life and old associates; things for which by nature I
had a very strong attachment. But I could not help it; I was driven
from it. I wanted something more; something I had not been able to
find. Yet I did not know what I wanted. I was simply in torment."
The truth is that, while he had always cherished ideals higher than
are usual, still they were not such as need set him apart from the
common life of men. But now he became suddenly averse from certain
pursuits and pleasures, not only good in themselves, but consonant to
his previous dispositions. The road to wealth lay open before him,
but his feet refused to tread it. He was invincibly drawn to poverty,
solitude, sacrifice; modes of life from which he shrank by nature,
and which led to no goal that he could see or understand. There is no
name so descriptive of such impulses as supernatural.
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