HIS SEARCH AMONG THE SECTS
HAD Protestantism possessed anything capable of attracting Isaac
Hecker he would certainly have found it, for he made due and diligent
search. He was, in a manner, bound to do so, for the atmosphere in
which he had been born and nurtured had not yet cleared so fully that
he could say to himself with positive assurance that there was no
safe midway between no-belief and Catholicity.
All the natural influences of his surroundings were such as to draw
him to one or other of the Protestant denominations. The power of
example and precept in his mother tended that way. The power of
public opinion, in so far as it had any religious bearing, was
Protestant. The most intelligent and high-minded people he had
enjoyed intimate acquaintance with were Protestant by birth and
training. True, most of these had fallen away from both the
fellowship and the doctrines of orthodoxy; but while they had not the
heart to point him to what had been their Egypt, still they had no
Promised Land to lead him into, and were confessedly in the Desert.
Yet their influence was indirectly favorable to Protestantism as
opposed to Catholicity, although no one but the ministers whom he
consulted thought of urging him to identify himself with any variety
of it until he showed signs of becoming a Catholic.
To this rule Brownson may appear as a partial exception, but until
the summer of 1844 he was so in appearance only. It is true that
Isaac Hecker had learned from him the claims of most of the great
forms of Protestantism, and got his personal testimony as to the
emptiness of them all. Brownson was a competent witness, for he had
been an accepted disciple of every school, from sterile
Presbyterianism to rank Transcendentalism. Although of a certain
testiness of temper, he bore malice to no man and to no body of men.
His testimony was in the presence of patent facts, and his
condemnation of all forms of orthodox Protestantism in the end was
unreserved. But, up to the date given above he still made a possible
exception in favor of Anglicanism. In the middle of April, 1843, he
wrote Isaac a letter, motioning him toward this sect, at the same
time affirming that he could not quite accept it for himself. Such
counsel was no better than motioning him away from it, and was but a
symbol of Brownson's own devious progress, swaying now to one side
and again to the other, but always going forward to Rome. But young
Hecker would learn for himself. Of an abnormally inquiring mind by
nature, he never accepted a witness other than himself about any
matter if he could help it.
In the early part of 1844 the question of religious affiliation began
to press for settlement with increasing urgency, casting him at times
into an agony of mind. It was not merely that he was impelled by
conscience towards the fulness of truth, but that truth in its
simplest elements seemed sometimes to be lacking to him. He was heard
to say in after years that, had he not found Catholicity true, he
would have been thrown back into a scepticism so painful as to
suggest suicide as a relief. Yet those who have trodden any of the
paths which lead from inherited heresy to true doctrine, will
appreciate the force of the influences, both personal and social,
which induced him to reconsider, and make for himself the grand
rounds of Protestant orthodoxy before turning his back upon it for
ever.
We find him, therefore, going diligently to all who claimed to be
watchmen on the walls of Sion, to seek from each one personally that
countersign which would tally with the divine word nature and grace
were uttering in his own soul. He interviewed ministers repeatedly.
"Not having had," he wrote in this magazine for November, 1887,
"personal and experimental knowledge of the Protestant denominations,
I investigated them all, going from one of them to another--Episcopal,
Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and all--conferring with their
ministers and reading their books. It was a dreary business, but I
did it. I knew Transcendentalism well and had been a radical
socialist. All was found to be as stated above. Brownson's ripe
experience and my own thoroughly earnest investigation tallied
perfectly. Indeed, the more you examine the Protestant sects in the
light of first principles the more they are found to weaken human
certitude, interfere with reason's native knowledge of God and His
attributes, and perplex the free working of the laws of human
thought. Protestantism is no religion for a philosopher, unless he is
a pessimist--if you can call such a being a philosopher--and adopts
Calvinism."
Why Calvinism, with its dread consistency of aversion for human
nature, did not attract him in these early inquiries was expressed by
Father Hecker in after years by the saying, "Heresy always involves a
mutilation of man's natural reason." The typical Calvinist foams
against man's natural capacity for the true and the good, and one of
its representatives, a Presbyterian minister, had the consistency to
say to our young disciple of nature, "Unless you believe that you are
totally depraved you will certainly suffer eternal damnation." These
words were spoken to one who felt some sort of apostleship growing
into act within his bosom: to preach the Gospel to those who are
totally depraved he perceived to be both vain and suicidal.
Furthermore, the consciousness of his own upright character, his
experience and observation of human virtue in others, made abstract
arguments needless to prove that Calvinism is an outrage on human
kind and a blasphemy against the Creator.
Anglicanism, too--uncleansed, as it notoriously is, of a Calvinistic
taint, broken up by absolute license of dissent, maintaining a mere
outward conformity to an extremely lax discipline--affronted Isaac
Hecker's ideal of the communion of man and God; man seeking and God
giving the one only revelation of divine truth, unifying and
organizing the Christian community: and this in spite of an
attraction for the beauty of the Episcopal service which he often
confesses in his diary.
In the same scrupulous spirit he tried the Baptists, though he must
have known that they were, almost without exception, Calvinists. He
had a conference with one of their ministers which, from the account
he gives of it, must have degenerated into something like a wrangle.
"If," said young Hecker, "you admit that baptism is not a saving
ordinance, why, then, do you separate yourselves from the rest of
Christendom on a mere question of ceremonial observance?" There could
be no satisfactory answer to this question.
As to the Methodists, they made fifty years ago much less pretension
to an intellectual footing in the religious world than at the present
day. One thing, Father Hecker tells us, drew his sympathetic regards
their way--their doctrine of perfection. He went to one of their
ministers, a Dr. Crawford. "I have read in the Bible," said he, "'If
thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell all thou hast'; now, that is the
kind of Christian I want to be." The answer was: "Well, young man,
you must not carry things too far; you are too enthusiastic. Christ
does not require that of us in the nineteenth century." After
conversing with him for some time, the minister told him to give up
such ideas and study for the ministry.
A singular episode in his search was his meeting with two
enthusiastic Mormon apostles, and a long and careful examination,
under their guidance, of the then newly-delivered revelations and
prophecies of Joseph Smith. He describes his Mormon acquaintances as
men of some intelligence, but given over, totally and blindly, to
Smith's imposture.
But what cut under the claims of every form of Protestantism was the
error, common to them all, concerning the rule of faith: the private
and independent judgment of the teaching of Scripture made by each
man for himself. As the real owner of a homestead has most reason to
dread a dealer in false titles, so the truly free man has most reason
to dread false liberty. Isaac Hecker was the type of rational
individual liberty, hence the very man to abhor most the caricature
of that prerogative in the typical Protestant.
Five years before his death, in an article in _The Catholic World_
entitled "Luther and the Diet of Worms," Father Hecker put the case
thus: "It is a misapprehension common among Protestants to suppose
that Catholics, in refusing the appeal of Martin Luther at the Diet
of Worms, condemn the use of reason or individual judgment, or
whatever one pleases to call the personal act which involves the
exercise of man's intellect and free will. The truth is, personal
judgment flows from what constitutes man a rational being, and there
is no power under heaven that can alienate personal judgment from
man, nor can man, if he would, disappropriate it. The cause of all
the trouble at the Diet of Worms was not personal judgment, for
neither party put that in question. The point in dispute was the
right application of personal judgment. Catholics maintained, and
always have and always will maintain, that a divine revelation
necessitates a divine interpreter. Catholics resisted, and always
will resist, on the ground of its incompetency, a human authority
applied to the interpretation of the contents of a divinely-revealed
religion. They consider such an authority, whether of the individual
or the state, in religious matters an intrusion. Catholics insist,
without swerving, upon believing in religion none but God. . . . To
investigate and make one's self certain that God has made a
revelation is of obligation, and consistent with Christianity. But as
a divine revelation springs from a source above the sphere of reason,
it necessitates a divinely authorized and divinely assisted
_interpreter_ and teacher. This is one of the essential functions of
the Church."
That the use of the Scriptures is not, and cannot be made the
ordinary means for making all men Christians, was plain to Isaac
Hecker for other reasons than the essential one thus clearly stated.
For, if such were the case, God would bestow on all men the gift to
read at sight, or cause all to learn how to read, or would have
recorded in the Book itself the words, "Unless a man reads the Bible,
and believes what he reads, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,"
or their plain equivalent; whereas the Bible, as we have it now, did
not exist in the apostolic days, the most glorious era of the
Christian Church. Such is Father Hecker's argument in a powerful
article in _The Catholic World_ for October, 1883. He continues:
"But suppose that everybody knew how to read, or all men were gifted
to read at first sight; suppose that everybody had a copy of the
Bible within his reach, a genuine Bible, and knew with certitude what
it means; suppose that Christ himself had laid it down as a rule that
the Bible, without note or comment, and as interpreted by each one
for himself, is the ordinary way of receiving the grace of
salvation--which is the vital principle of Protestantism; suppose all
these evident assumptions as true. Would the Bible even in that case
suffice to make any one man, woman, or child a Christian? Evidently
not. And why? For that is a personal work, and the personal work of
Christ; for Christ alone can make men Christians. And no account of
Christ is Christ. . . The contents of a book, whatever these may be,
are powerless to place its readers in direct contact and vital
relations with its author. No man is so visionary as to imagine that
the mental operation of reading the _Iliad,_ or the _Phædo,_ or the
_Divine Comedy,_ suffices to put him in communication with the
personality of Homer, or Plato, or Dante. All effort is in vain to
slake the thirst of a soul famishing for the _Fountain_ of living
waters from a brook, or to stop the cravings of a soul for the living
Saviour with a printed book. . . . His words are 'Come unto ME all
that are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you.' It was the
attempt to make men Christians by reading the Bible that broke
Christendom into fragments, multiplied jarring Christian sects,
produced swarms of doubters, filled the world with sceptics and
scoffers at all religion, frustrated combined Christian action, and
put back the Christian conquest of the world for centuries. Three
centuries of experience have made it evident enough that, if
Christianity is to be maintained as a principle of life among men, it
must be on another footing than the suicidal hypothesis invented in
the sixteenth century after the birth of its divine Founder."
His farewell interviews with exponents of the Protestant claims were
mainly, if not wholly, with representatives of Anglicanism. This did
not arise from any grounded hope of getting all he wanted there, but
from an insensible drift of his mind upon those currents of thought
set in motion by the great power of Newman. The air was full of
promise of non-Roman Catholicity, and the voices which called the
English-speaking world to listen were the most eloquent since
Shakespeare. It needed but a dim hope pointing along any road to
induce the delicate conscience of Isaac Hecker to try if it might not
be a thoroughfare. But neither in his copious entries in the diary at
this period, nor in his articles in this magazine for the year 1887
on Dr. Brownson's difficulties--and these were much like his own--do
we find any trace of his discovering in Anglicanism a germ of
Catholicity unfolding from the chrysalis of genuine Protestantism and
casting it off. This was readily perceived in Isaac Hecker's bearing
and conversation by acute Episcopalians themselves, as in the case of
Dr. Seabury, who, as Father Hecker relates in the articles above
referred to, prophesied Brownson's conversion to Catholicity, and did
so for reasons which Seabury must have known would apply to young
Hecker also.
Many at this time were being drawn by poetical sentiment to the
beautiful and religious forms of Episcopalian worship; drawn and held
rather by imagination and feeling than by any adhesion of their minds
to distinctive Anglican doctrines. Father Hecker was, indeed, more
poetical in temperament than at first acquaintance he seemed to be,
but his mind was so constituted that he must have the main reasons of
things, whether religious or not, firmly settled before he could
enjoy their use. Nor could he be content with fragments of revealed
truth, such as are found in all denominations of non-Catholics.
"There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world," says
Newman; "it comes down by tradition from age to age. . . . Men
[outside the church] take up and profess these scattered truths,
merely because they fall in with them." Not so Father Hecker: no
flotsam and jetsam of doctrine for him, unless some fragment would
reveal to him the name of the ship from which it had been torn, and
the port from which she had sailed, and so lead him to the discovery
of the ship herself, crew, cargo, port, and owner.
Yet he lingered long over the claim of Anglicanism to be the Catholic
religion. Of Mr. Haight and of his interviews with him we have
already spoken. Through him he came across a published letter of a
Mr. Norris, Episcopal minister in Carlisle, Pa., which so pleased him
for its Catholic tendency that he wrote to him, asking to be allowed
to go to Carlisle and live there as the writer's pupil. The answer,
though a refusal of this request, was kind, and contained a cordial
invitation to visit Mr. Norris after Easter. On his way to Concord,
in the following spring, Isaac made a long detour to the little town
in southern Pennsylvania, interviewed Mr. Norris, and came away no
wiser than before.
The following words of the diary, under date of March 30, 1844, refer
to an Episcopal dignitary of higher grade:
"Mr. Haight gave me a note of introduction to Dr. Seabury. I called
to see him two evenings ago and had a very pleasant conversation with
him. His sociableness and perfect openness of expression I was quite
delighted with. He frankly acknowledged that he thought that error
had been committed on both sides in the controversy of the
Reformation between the Pope and the Anglican Church. He recommended
me to examine those points which kept me from joining the Anglican or
Roman Church before I should do anything further, as there was the
charge of schism against the Anglican Church and neglect of
discipline among the members of her communion. I told him that though
the Church of Rome may commit errors in practice, she had not
committed any in principle, and that it was easier to prune a
luxuriant tree than to revivify a tree almost exhausted of life. I
left him with an earnest invitation to call again."
This half-confession of schism and frank avowal of lack of discipline
on the part of a perfectly representative official of the Anglican
Church was something singularly Providential, for it came within a
fortnight after Isaac Hecker's first interview with Bishop Hughes,
described in the diary under date of March 22. That powerful man and
great prelate was a type of the best form of Catholicism at that day.
He was of the Church militant in more senses than one; and the
military qualities which have inspired the public action of Catholic
champions for the past three centuries were strongly developed in
him. That it was for the good of religion that it should have such
characters as John Hughes to care for its public welfare there is no
room to doubt. Since then the temper of Protestant Americans has
undergone a change which is almost radical. It has grown infinitely
more just and kindly towards Catholics. The decay of the Protestant
bond of cohesion from lapse of time and from the unsettlement of
belief in its chief doctrines; the fighting of two wars, one of them
the great Rebellion, which fused the populations of States and
acquainted men better with their neighbors; the coming in of millions
of Catholic foreigners whose every breath was an aspiration for
liberty; the rise, culmination, and collapse of the anti-Catholic
movement termed Know-nothing-ism; the polemical warfare of Bishop
Hughes himself and of his contemporaries--these and other causes have
made it possible, nay necessary, to treat non-Catholics in a
different spirit from what wisdom dictated fifty years ago.
If Dr. Seabury owned to schism and lack of discipline in Anglicanism,
Bishop John Hughes brought out to Isaac Hecker the very contrary as
the attractive qualities of Catholicity. He was questioned by the
young inquirer about the latter's chances for studying for the
priesthood should he decide on entering the Church, and he answered
according to rigid notions of the place of authority in religion.
"He said," are the words of the diary, ending a summary of the
interview, "that their Church was one of discipline. I thanked him
for the information that he gave, and told him that it was for just
such instruction that I sought him. He seemed to think that I had
some loose notions of the Church. So far, this settles my present
intention of uniting myself with the Roman Catholic Church. Though I
feel not in the least disinclined to be governed by the most rigid
discipline of any church, yet I am not prepared to enter the Roman
Catholic Church at present. It is not national with us, hence it does
not meet our wants, nor does it fully understand and sympathize with
the experience and dispositions of our people. It is principally made
up of adopted and foreign individuals."
To us this is exceedingly instructive, for it tells us how _not_ to
meet the earnest seeker after Catholic truth. Even a good-natured
dog does not show his teeth when caressed, nor is an artillery salute
the only show of amity between even warlike powers. Yet the repellant
attitude of the great controversialist was that of very many
representative Catholics of his time, especially those holding his
high office. For although he really did know the American people, and
although their country was fully his own, and was by him deeply and
intelligently loved, yet he did not understand or sympathize with the
religious movements of which his strange young visitor was the truest
type. He afterwards knew him better and loved him.
The toss thus given Isaac Hecker by Bishop Hughes's catapult of
"discipline" had the good effect of throwing him again upon a full
and perfect and final investigation of Protestantism. With what
immediate result is shown by the Seabury interview already related,
and with what honesty of purpose is shown by the following words
written the same day:
"If a low passion usurps the place of pure love, if a blind prejudice
usurps the place of Catholic truth, he who informs me of it, though
he had been my enemy (if enemies it is possible for me to have), I
will receive him as an angel from heaven, as an instrument of God. My
honor, my consistency, my character consists in faithfulness to God's
love, God's truth, and nothing else. Let me be but true to Him--how
then can I be false to either man or the world? It is Him who knows
our secret thoughts that we should fear (if fear we must) and obey."
Thus it was Anglicanism that engaged Isaac Hecker's last efforts to
adjust a Protestant outside to his inward experience with the Holy
Spirit; and this for a reason quite evident. That body pretended,
then as now, to be the Catholic Christian Church, assisting men to
union with God by a divinely-founded external organism, but not
demanding the sacrifice of human liberty. To an inexperienced
observer such as he, it seemed possible that Anglicanism might be the
union of historical Christianity with manly freedom. Closer
observation proved to him not only the compatibility of Catholicity
and liberty, but that Anglicanism, though assuming some of the forms
of Catholic unity, is kept alive by the principle of individual
separatism common to all Protestant sects. For a time, or in a place,
it may have much or little of Catholicity; but in no place can it
live for a day without the Protestant principle of a right of final
appeal to the individual judgment to decide upon the verity of
doctrine.
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