NEW INFLUENCES
BISHOP McCLOSKEY, afterwards the first American Cardinal, was
coadjutor to Bishop Hughes from 1844 to 1847. He was living at the
old Cathedral when Isaac Hecker first called upon him. He was still a
young man, less than ten years separating him from the youthful
catechumen. In temperament they were very different. The bishop, a
man of routine in method and of no original views of principles, was
so, nevertheless, by mental predisposition rather than by positive
choice. He was a man of finished education; a dignified speaker, whose
words read as impressively as they sounded. Although the two men were
so unlike, the bishop could, at least after brief hesitation, fully
appreciate Isaac Hecker; nay, could love him, could further his
plans, and stand by him in his difficulties. Before we are done with
this Life, the reader will see this more in detail.
Nor was Bishop McCloskey without light as a judge in spiritual
matters. By nature calm and self-poised, and readily obedient to
reason, the grace of his high office, his wide knowledge of men, his
extensive reading, were doubtless supplemented by a special infusion
of heavenly wisdom, due to his upright purpose and his spotless life.
Though not timid, he was not conspicuous for courage; his refuge in
difficulty was a high order of prudence, never cowardice; nor did he
err either by precipitancy, by cruelty, or by rigidity of adherence
to abstract rules of law. Father Hecker knew him thoroughly well, and
admired him; more, he profited by his guidance, and that not only at
this earliest period of their intercourse. It was by him that Isaac
Hecker's vocation was, though not revealed, yet most wisely directed.
Brownson told the young man that he ought to devote himself to the
Germans in this country; Bishop Hughes advised him to go to St.
Sulpice and study for the secular priesthood; Bishop McCloskey told
him to become a religious.
Hitherto Isaac Hecker's environment had been entirely non-Catholic;
the ebbing and flowing of a sea of doubt and inquiry upon which
floated small boats and rafts which had been cast off from the good
ship of Christ. Now that he was on board the ship itself, he found
its crew and passengers sailing straight on toward their destined
haven, paying small regard, as a rule, to the small craft and the
shipwrecked sailors tossing on the wild waves around them, and only
surprised when one or another hailed their vessel and asked to be
taken on board. Nor did the attitude of non-Catholics, taking them
generally, invite anything else. Isaac Hecker, passing into the
Church, not only came into contact with its members, but was to be
for some years exclusively in their company. But, though carried
beyond the Ripleys, the Alcotts, the Lanes, the Emersons, and beyond
the theories they in some sort stand for and represent, he had
learned them and their lesson, and never lost his aptitude for
returning to their company with a Catholic message. His farewell to
that class did not involve loss of affectionate interest, for in mind
he continually reverted to them. He knew that their peculiar traits
were significant of the most imperative invitation of Providence to
missionary work. He thought it was to that class, or, rather, to the
multitude to whom they were prophets, that the exponent of
Catholicity should first address himself. They possessed the highest
activity of the natural faculties; they were all but the only class
of Americans who loved truth for its own sake, that trait which is
the peculiarity of the Catholic mind, and the first requisite for
real conversion.
It may have been the latent strength of this conviction that, within
a year after his reception into the Church, permanently affected the
influence which Brownson had so long exerted over him. It ceased now
to be in any sense controlling, and at no future time regained force
enough to be directive. They found the Church together, went together
into its vestibule, and were received nearly at the same time. And
then the wide liberties of a universal religion gave ample scope and
large suggestion for the accentuation and development of their native
differences. Brownson was a publicist and remained so; Isaac Hecker
was a mystic and remained so. To the mysticism of the latter was
added an external apostolate; the public activity of the former was,
indeed, apostolic, but upon a field not only different from any he
would himself have spontaneously chosen, but quite unlike. Our reader
already knows how grievous a loss to the public exposition of the
Church in America this defection of Brownson's genius from its true
direction seemed to Father Hecker. He never ceased to deplore it as a
needless calamity, overruled in great measure, indeed, by the good
Providence of God, but not wholly repaired.
Father Hecker's affection for Dr. Brownson never wavered, and his
gratitude towards him was only deepened and made more efficacious
with the lapse of time and the growth of his own spiritual
experience. If they did not always agree, either in principles or in
questions of policy, they always loved each other. The memoranda
furnish an interesting proof of this abiding affection on the part of
Father Hecker. He was asked:
"Don't you think we might have a memorial tablet to Dr. Brownson in
our church?"
"Yes! Of all the men I ever knew, he had most influence over me."
"When you were in early life?"
"Yes, of course. Oh! in after life no man has had influence with me,
but only God."
This meant, of course, the influence of master upon disciple, and not
that of lawful authority or of fraternal love, to both of which
Father Hecker was ever very sensitive.
Speaking at another time of Brownson, he quoted this sentence from
_The Convert_ as so perfect an epitome of the man that it should be
put on his monument:
"I had one principle, and only one, to which, since throwing up
Universalism, I had been faithful; a principle to which I had,
perhaps, made some sacrifices--that of following my own honest
convictions whithersoever they should lead me."
And just here is found one of those points of essential difference
which it is interesting to note between these two men, so closely
drawn together by Divine Providence at one period, and in such a
relation that to the elder the function of guidance seemed to have
been appointed. In unswerving fidelity to conviction they were on a
par, but in native clearness of vision and instinctive aversion from
error they were far less closely matched. Brownson in early life had
tried, accepted, and preached various forms of aberration from true
doctrine. One might say of him, that, having found himself outside
the highway at his start, he gathered accretions from hedge and ditch
as he struggled toward the true road, and went through an after
process of sloughing them one by one. Perhaps that process ended in
making him over-timid. It was otherwise with Isaac Hecker. He, too,
had stopped to consider many doctrines which purported to be true;
more than that, he had recognized in each the modicum of truth which
it possessed. But the falsity with which this was overloaded was
powerful enough to repel him, in spite of the truth he knew to be
contained in it. He carried in himself the touchstone to which all
that was akin to it beyond him responded of necessity. The Light
which lights every man who comes into the world had not only never
been darkened in him by sinful courses, but it seemed to burn with a
crystal clearness which threw up into hideous and repellant
proportions all that was offensive to it. Many voices had called him
from without, but he had refused obedience unto any. He never
submitted until his submission was full and not to be withdrawn. So,
once in the Church, and enjoying her divine guarantee of external
authority, he had few if any disquieting recollections of error to
breed distrust of the light that shone within him. His soul was of
that order to which truth speaks authoritatively and at first hand;
of that soil from which institutions which are to stand spring by a
true process of development, because it is the soil which first
received their germs. Always it is the soul of man which is inspired,
the mind of man that is enlightened. Then the teaching comes as
record of the fact and the doctrine; then the institution solidifies
about them, a perpetual witness that to many men and ages of men the
same message has been handed down by its first recipients and has
produced in them its proper results. The race of such souls has not
died out in the Christian Church. The one truth, spoken once for all
by the Incarnate Word, takes on for them new aspects and new tones.
They are the pioneers of great movements. Nurtured in the Church,
their ardor burns away mere conventionalities; born outside the
Church, the light she carries is a beacon, and the voice she utters
is felt as that of the true Mother. To adapt once more a pregnant
sentence from young Hecker, of the truth of which he was himself an
example: "It is God in them which believes in God."
But to return to Brownson. An entry in the journal, made nearly a
year later, sums up the total impression which Brownson had made upon
his young disciple:
"June 22, 1845.--0. A. B. is here. He arrived this morning. Though he
is a friend to me, and the most critical periods of my experience
have been known to him, and he has frequently given me advice and
sympathy, yet he never moves my heart. He has been of inestimable use
to me in my intellectual development. He is, too, a man of heart. But
he is so strong, and so intellectually active, that all his energy is
consumed in thought. He is an intellectual athlete. He thinks for a
dozen men. He does not take time to realize in heart for himself. No
man reads or thinks more than he. But he is greater as a writer than
as a person. There are men who never wrote a line, but whose
influence is deeper and more extensive than that of others who have
written heavy tomes.
"It is too late for Brownson to give himself to contemplation and
interior recollection. He is a controversialist; a doctor. The last
he will be before long. Some have wondered why I should have
contracted such a friendship for one whom they imagine to be so harsh
and dictatorial. I have not felt this. His presence does not change
me; nor do I find myself where I was not after having met him. He has
not the temperament of a genius, but that of a rhetorician and
declaimer. He arrives at his truths by a regular and consecutive
system of logic. His mind is of a historical more than of a poetical
mould.
"As a man, I have never known one so conscientious and
self-sacrificing. This is natural to him. His love of right is
supreme, and the thing he detests most is bad logic. It makes him
peevish and often riles his temper. He defeats, but will never
convince an opponent. This is bad. No one loves to break a lance with
him, because he cuts such ungentlemanly gashes. He is strong, and he
knows it. There is more of the Indian chief than of the Christian
knight in his composition. But he has something of both, though
nothing of the modern scholar, so called. His art is logic, but he
never aims at art. By nature he is a most genuine and true man; none
so much so. By no means E----" [Emerson?] "who ever prates about this
thing. If he attempts embellishment, you see at once it is borrowed;
it is not in his nature. There is a pure and genuine vein of poetry
running through him, but it is not sufficient to tincture the whole
flow of his life. He is a man of the thirteenth or fourteenth century
rather than of the nineteenth. He is an anomaly among its scholars,
writers, and divines. He is not thorough on any one subject though at
home on all. What a finished collegiate education would have done for
him I am baffled to conjecture. He is genuine, and I love him for
that; it is the crown of all virtues. But I must stop. I only
intended to mention that he is here."
The reader may well suppose that Father Hecker fully appreciated
Brownson's literary genius. The English language in his grasp was a
weapon to slay and a talisman to raise to life. Never was
argumentation made more delightful reading; never did a master
instruct more exclusively by the aid of his disciple's highest
faculties than did Brownson. Habituated his whole life long to the
ardent study of the greatest topics of the human understanding, he
was able to teach all, as he had taught young Hecker, how to think,
discern, judge, penetrate, decide about them with matchless power;
and he clothes his conclusions in language as adequate to express
them as human language well can be. Clearness, precision, force,
purity, vividness, loftiness are terms applicable to Dr. Brownson's
literary style. It may be that the general reading public will not
study his works merely for the sake of his literary merits; the
pleasures of the imagination and of narrative are not to be found in
Dr. Brownson. But he certainly will win his way to the suffrages of
the higher class of students of fine writing. And let one have any
shadow of interest in the great questions he treats, and every page
displays a style which is the rarest of literary gifts. The very fact
that his writing is untinted by those lesser beauties which catch the
eye but to impede its deepest glances, is in itself an excellence all
the greater in proportion to the gravity of his topics. Absolutely
free from the least obscurity, his diction is a magnetic medium
uniting the master's personality, the disciple's understanding, and
the essence of the subject under consideration. Cardinal Newman, some
may believe, possessed this supreme rhetoric in perhaps even a higher
degree than Brownson, but so much can be said of few other writers of
English prose. George Ripley, whom Father Hecker deemed the best
judge of literature in our country or elsewhere, assured him that
there were passages in Dr. Brownson which could not be surpassed in
the whole range of English literature.
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