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That caused me some pain but no regret, and instead of feeling sorrow, you will, I hope, be contented that I should continue the path that will make me better." Concerning Isaac Hecker's residence at Brook Farm, which was begun about the middle of the following January, we shall have more to say hereafter.
Meantime this awful Deity, so prompt to enter Father Hecker's mind, coming at times like a withering blast from the desert, was still the only attraction of his soul, the only object of his love. He could no more keep his mind off God now than he could before, and now God killed him, and then He made him alive.
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.
It is the goodness, mercy, and love of God which keeps me from sadness." ISAAC HECKER'S zeal for social reform lent force to his strictly personal cravings for a more religious life; he longed for wider scope than individual effort could possibly bestow, and also for a supernatural point of vantage.
During his long years of illness Father Hecker's reading continued upon the lines he had ever followed, the Scriptures holding, of course, the first place.
We preface the subjoined extract from the diary with the remark that Father Hecker's reading of signs of the Divine will in men and events often brought him to the verge of credulity, over which he was prevented from stepping by his shrewd native sense.
He distinguished himself by inquiries into the cholera epidemic in 1832, and translated these pieces of Hecker's in 1833, for publication by the Sydenham Society. He afterwards translated Hecker's other treatises on epidemics of the Middle Ages. Dr. B.G. Babington was Physician to Guy's Hospital from 1840 to 1855, and was a member of the Medical Council of the General Board of Health.
Father Hecker's repertory covered the entire ground between scepticism and Catholicism. In refutation of Protestantism the principal lectures were: The Church and the Republic; Luther and the Reformation; How and Why I Became a Catholic, or A Search after Rational Christianity; and The State of Religion in the United States.
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.
And these two were on planes so different that it is hardly fair to compare them with each other. 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.
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