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 fromThe Convertas 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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"COULD I but give up all my time to contemplation, study, reading, and reflection!"
Upon this aspiration as a background the whole matter of Isaac Hecker's vocation must be considered. In substance we have met with it very frequently already; in the shape just given it confronts us on the first page of the new diary begun a few days before his baptism. And as our reader accompanies us through the records he made during the year that still elapsed before he entered the Redemptorist Order, nothing, we think, will become more evident than that he was called to something beyond adhesion to the Church, the worthy reception of the sacraments, or even the ordinary sacerdotal state.
To make this still plainer at the start, it may be useful to describe briefly the special grounds whereon Isaac Hecker fought his life-long battles. These were, first: The validity of those natural aspirations which are called religious, and which embrace the veracity of reason in its essential affirmations. Second: Whether man be by nature guileless or totally depraved: Third, Whether religion be or be not intrinsically and primarily an elevating influence whose end is to raise men to real union with God.
To many inquirers after the true religion such preliminary doubts have been already settled, either by natural bent of mind or docility to previous training; and they pass on to consider apostolical succession, the primacy of Peter, the nature and number of the sacraments, and other matters wherein heresy errs by denial or by defect. But to Isaac Hecker all such points as these were, in a sense, subsidiary. He had asked admission into the Church because he found it to be the only teaching society on earth whose doctrines gave complete and adequate satisfaction to that fundamental craving of his nature which prompted his questions. She accredited herself to him as fully by that fact as she must have done to many a philosophic pagan among those who were the first disciples to the new faith preached by St. John or St. Paul. All else he accepted with an implicit, child-like confidence not different from that which moves the loyal descendant of ages of Catholic ancestors. It was clear to him that these accompanying doctrines and institutions must have been enfolded within the original germ, and must be received on the same authority, not by an analytic process and on their merits, one by one.
What he wanted was, in the first place, sustenance for what he invariably calls "the life" given him; and next, light to see in what way he was to put to use the strength so gained. The first effect of the sacraments was what one might call the natural one of making more visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating his instinctive efforts to pierce through them. After the rapturous joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation and dryness heavier than he had ever known at once set in. Perhaps he had expected the very reverse of this. At all events, it was not many days before it drew from him the complaint that in leaving Concord he had also left behind him the great interior sweetness which had buoyed him up. On August 11 he writes:
"How hard it has been for me to go through with all these solemn mysteries and ceremonies without experiencing any of those great delights which I have [before] felt. Why is this? Is it to try my faith? O Lord! how long shall I be tried in this season of desolation? Are these [delights] never to return? Have I acted unworthily? What shall I do to receive these blessings again?"
Then he resolves to make a novena, fasting the while on bread and water, to entreat their renewal. But at once a better mood sets in and he adds:
"The highest state of perfection is to be content to be nothing. Lord, give me strength not to ask of Thee anything that is pleasant to me. I renounce what I have just asked for, and will try to do all without the hope of recompense. If Thou triest my soul, let it not go until it has paid the uttermost farthing."
"August 15, 1844.—To-day is the holyday of the Assumption of the dear, Blessed Mary, Mother of our Lord and Saviour Jesus. Oh! may I be found worthy of her regard and love."
"He that has not learned the bitterness of the drops of woe has not learned to live. One hour of deep agony teaches man more love and wisdom than a whole long life of happiness. . .
"In many faces I see passing through the crowded streets there seems a veiled beauty, an angel quickening me with purer life as I go by them in anxious haste. Do we not see the hidden worth, glory, and beauty of others as our own becomes revealed to us? Would the Son of God have been needed to ransom man if he were not of incomparable value?"
One of the dreams that at this time occupied Isaac's mind was that of undertaking a pilgrimage to Rome. He wrote to Henry Thoreau, proposing that they should go in company, and felt regret when his invitation was not accepted. His notion was to "work, beg, and travel on foot, so far as land goes, to Rome. I know of no pleasanter, better way, both for soul and body, than to make such a pilgrimage in the old, middle-age fashion; to suffer hunger, storm, cold, heat—all that can affect the body of flesh. If we receive hard usage, so much the better will it be for us. Why thump one's own flesh here? Let it be done for us by others, our soul, meanwhile, looking at higher objects. . . . I feel that I have the stuff to do it in me. I would love to work and beg my way to Rome if it cost me ten or fifteen years of my life."
Thoreau replied to this proposal that such a tour had been one of his own early dreams, but that he had outlived it. He had now "retired from all external activity in disgust, and his life was more Brahminical, Artesian-well, Inner-Temple like." So the scheme, which had secured Bishop McCloskey's approbation, although he had forcibly represented to young Hecker that to go absolutely destitute of money, and dependent for all things upon alms, would be impossible, was presently shelved. It was but one of the diversions with which certain souls, not yet enlightened as to their true course, nor arrived at the abandonment of themselves to Divine Providence, are amused. Their inactivity seems idleness to them, and they mistake the restless impulse which bids them be up and doing for the voice of conscience or the inspiration of heavenly wisdom; but it is neither. Sometimes it is a superfluity of natural energy seeking an outlet; sometimes it is the result of the strain placed upon nature by a very powerful influx of grace. The infusion of power from above is often greatly in excess of the light necessary for guidance in its use. This last rarely comes entirely from the inner touch of the Holy Spirit. In the lives of the Fathers of the Desert we read of a certain young brother, Ptolemy, who went astray from sound spirituality. When admonished he asserted that he need learn the spiritual life from none save the Holy Ghost, of whose inspirations any man of good will could be certain. He was told by the old monks that the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and the understanding of the same are two distinct things, and that this understanding is disclosed only to him whose will has been purified by the practice of obedience and humility. In truth, it is rarely that the inner voice of God does not call for an external interpreter, which, if it does no more than furnish a divinely authorized test and criterion, is none the less necessary. Moreover, the inner voice seldom provides ways and means for its own purposes. Father Hecker was ever a strenuous defender of this inner and outer unity of the Divine guidance, and his vocation was an illustration of it. However masterful the inner voice of God which called him away from the world, he was helpless till he heard its tones harmonized by the counsel of Bishop McCloskey. When he found that even with this backing secured, the external obstacles to his plan proved invincible, he was once more nonplussed. "If not this, what?" he asks himself.
"I feel deeply and strongly that the circle of family happiness is not sufficient for my nature, but what I can profitably do outside of this I have not the ability to say.
"That our real wishes are presentiments of our capabilities is a very true proverb, no doubt; but are we not most ignorant of what these are? It seems as though we are all unconsciously educated for unknown ends and purposes.
"I look upon myself as belonging to that class of decidedly unfortunate beings who have no marked talent for any particular pursuit. The words talent, genius, have for me no application whatever. I stand on the confines of both worlds, not feeling the necessity nor having the true valor to decide for either sphere.
"O heaven! why was this deep, ever-burning life given me, unless it be that I might be slowly and painfully consumed by it? All greatness is in the actor, not in the act. He whom God has blessed with an end in life, can earnestly labor to accomplish that end. But alas for that poor mortal whose existence only serves to fill up space in the world! How excruciating to him to be conscious of this! O Prometheus!
"Simply to be what God would have us, is to be greater than to have the applause of the whole world otherwise. All such statements as this are necessarily one-sided. Because there are always good and virtuous men in the world whose approbation is that of God.
"There is an instinct in man which draws him to danger, as in battle-fields; as there is also in the fly, drawing it to the flame of light. It is the desire of the spirit within, seeking for release."
"August 20, 1844.—Scarce do I know what to say of myself. If I accuse myself by the light given me, it would lead me to leave all around me. My conscience thus accuses me. And in partaking of worldly things and going into the company around me, my interior self has no pleasure, and I feel afterwards that the labor and time have been misspent. How to live a life which shall be conformable to the life wlthin and not separate from the persons and circumstances around me, I cannot conceive. I am now like one who tastes a little of this and then a little of that dish, while his time is wasted and his mind distracted from that pure enjoyment which is a foretaste of the bliss of the angels. I feel my primitive instincts and unvitiated tastes daily becoming more sensible to inspirations from above, from the invisible. The ideal world, the soul world, the kingdom of heaven within, I feel as if I were more a friend and citizen of O Lord! my heart would break forth in praise of the riches of the life given within! It seems that in this that we enjoy all, know all, and possess all. If we have Thee, O Lord! if Thou hast taken up Thy dwelling in us, we enjoy heaven within and paradise without!"
"August 21, 1844. The object of education should be to place each individual mind in vital union with the One Universal Educator. . . .
"The only pleasure for man is his union witha prioriprinciples."
"August 23, 1844.—If the animal passions are indulged, of course you must pay the cost. If you get a large family of children about you, and please your animal appetites with all sorts of luxury, and indulge your pride in all the foolish fashions of show, do not wonder that it cost all your time to uphold such an expensive life. This is necessary, unless you cheat some one else out of the hard-earned value of his labor. I cannot conceive how a Christian, under the present arrangements, can become wealthy without violating repeatedly the precepts of his religion. . . ."
"Where shall we find God? Within.
"How shall we hear the voices of angels? Listen with the inward ear.
"When are we with God? When we are no more with ourselves.
"When do we hear the music of heaven? When we are entirely silent.
"What is the effect of sin? Confusion.
"Where does God dwell? In silence.
"Who loves God? He who knows nothing and loves nothing of himself.
"What is prayer? The breath of silence.
"What is love? The motion of the pure will.
"What is light? The shadow of love.
"What is force? The power of love.
"Where does God dwell? Where there is peace.
"Who is most like God? He who knows he is the least like Him.
"What is the innermost of all? Stillness.
"Who is the purest? He who is most beyond temptation.
"What is the personality of man? The absolute negation ofGod.
"What is God? The absolute affirmation in man.
"What is it to know? It is to be ignorant.
"What should we desire? Not to desire.
"What is the most positive answer? Silence.
"What is the truest? That which cannot be proven."
"August 25, 1844.—In silence, suffering without murmuring. An eternal thirst, enduring without being quenched. Infinite longings without being met. Heart ever burning, never refreshed. Void within and mystery all around. Ever escaping that which we would reach. Tortured incessantly without relief. Alone—bereft of God, angels, men—all. Hopes gone, fears vanished, and love dead within. These, and more than these, must man suffer."
"August 28, 1844.—Is it not because I have been too much engaged in reading and paid too little attention to the centre that I have lost myself, as it were? My position here distracts my attention and I lose the delight, intimate knowledge, and sweet consciousness of my interior life. How can this be remedied? I am constantly called of to matters in which I have no relish; and if I retreat for a short time, they rest on me like a load, so that I cannot call myself free at any moment. I see the case as it stands, and feel I am losing my interior life from the false position in which I am placed.
"The human ties and the material conditions in which I am should unquestionably be sacrificed to the divine interior relation to the One, the Love-Spirit, which, alas! I have so sensibly felt. Can a man live in the world and follow Christ? I know not; but, as for me, I find it impossible. I feel more and more the necessity of leaving the society and the distracting cares of a city business for a silent and peaceful retreat, to the end that I may restore the life I fear I am losing. Our natural interests should be subject to our human ties; our human ties to our spiritual relations; and who is he who brings all these into divine harmony?
"How shall I make the sacrifice which shall accomplish the sole end I have, and should have, in view? Thrice have I left home for this purpose, and each time have returned unavoidably so, at least, it seems to me. Once more, I trust, will prove a permanent and immovable trial."
To some, a most striking incidental proof of his inaptitude for the ordinary layman's life, is found in the subjoined extract from the memoranda. Speaking of this period, Father Hecker said:
"Some time after my reception into the Church, I went to Bishop McCloskey and told him I had scruples against renting a seat in the Cathedral in Mott Street. 'If I do,' I said, 'I shall feel sore at the thought that I have set apart for me in the house of God a seat which a poor man cannot use.' I told him that for this reason I had knelt down near the doorway, among the crowd of transient poor people. Oh, how he eased my spirit by sympathizing with my sentiment, and satisfied me by declaring that the renting of pews was only from necessity, and he wished we could get along without it."
His relations with some of his former friends at Brook Farm still continued, though in a somewhat attenuated condition. From a long and appreciative letter sent him by Burrill Curtis, we make an extract, followed by Isaac's comments on it:
"October 13, 1844.—Your preparedness for any fate has been one of the chief attractions of your character to me, for I believe it is deeper than a mere state of mind. But, for all that, your restlessness is uppermost just now; not as a contradictory element, for it is not; but as a discovering power."
Isaac's journal, just at this time, was chiefly devoted to what he calls "the many smaller, venial sins which beset my path and keep me down to earth. Also to prescribe such remedies as may seem to me best for these thorns in the flesh." On October 26 he notes that he has received the letter just quoted, and remarks:
"It showed more regard for me than I thought he had. The truth is, I do not feel myself worthy to be the friend of any one, and would pass my life in being a friend to all, without recognizing their friendship towards me.
"To-day I have felt more humanly tender than ever. The past has come up before me with much emotion. ——- has been much in my thoughts.
"I have experienced those unnatural feelings which I have felt heretofore. I feel that the spirit world is near and glimmering all around me. The nervous shocks I have been subject to, but which I have not experienced for some time back, recurred this evening. I am known to spirits, or else I apprehend them."
He had taken up Latin and Greek again, and seems to have entered a class of young men under the tutorship of a Mr. Owen. The entry just quoted from goes on as follows:
"I do not devote as much time to study as I should, or as I might. I fear I shall never make anything of my studies. I do not endeavor with all my might. This study has thrown me into another sphere. I like it not. I feel apprehensive of something, of somewhat. Ten years from now will fix my destiny, if I have any."
Much good as he continued to receive from the sacrament of penance, he found a not altogether usual difficulty in preparing for it. Perhaps it was in the counsel he received there that he got courage to gird himself for his renewed attack upon the languages, for his delinquencies in this respect have the air of being the most tangible of the matters on his conscience.
"I must prepare for confession this week," he writes on November 5, 1844. "Oh! would that I could accuse myself as I should. Man is not what he should be so long as he is not an angel. Oh, dear God! give me Thy aid, and help me in my weaknesses. What sins can I accuse myself of now? First—oh, Love! give me light to accuse myself—to see my sins.This is my greatest sin; that I cannot accuse myself and am so wicked.
"Each day I omit a hundred duties that I should not. Lord, give me Thy Spirit, that I may be humble, meek, and sweet in all my walk and conversation. Fill my heart with Thy love."
In a little while he found himself able to study more diligently, and though he continually regrets the inroad this makes upon his interior life, he seems not only to have persevered, but to have taken considerable interest and an active part in the debates got up at regular intervals by the class he had joined. He notes that he has serious doubts whether it will be wise for him to express his full mind on some of the subjects brought up. His fellow-pupils were all Protestants, and some of them well-informed and talented young men. His views would be new to them, and so would many of his authorities for his statements of fact, and he thought it not unlikely that a commotion might sometimes be raised which would not at all commend itself to the teacher of the institution. He concluded, however, to throw prudence to the winds, and on controverted points to express his sentiments freely and frankly. There were some animated discussions, no doubt.
He was endeavoring at this time to retrench his hours of sleep to the narrowest dimensions compatible with health, and found it, we may note, the most difficult of his austerities. In other respects they remained severe, as this entry may witness:
"November 27, 1844.—I am sorely perplexed what to eat. Nuts, apples, and bread seem not a diet wholly suitable, and what to add I know not. Potatoes are not good; I think they were the cause of my illness last week. I do not wish to partake of anything that comes even remotely from an animal. Cooking, also, I wish, as far as possible, to dispense with. I would I could dispense with the whole digestive apparatus! Cheese, butter, eggs, milk, are for many reasons not a part of my diet."
The balance of this fourth volume of his diary, begun September 9, 1844, and ended January 2, 1845, is mainly occupied with addresses to his guardian angel. He was, as those who knew him will remember, always extremely devout to the angelic choirs. On his birthday this year he writes as follows:
"December 18, 1844.—Let me look back for a few moments and see where I stood last year this time (an incomprehensible length), and where I now stand. Then my path was dim, unfixed, unsettled. Then I was not so disentangled from the body and its desires as, I hope in God, I now am. In all I feel a consciousness that since then I have spiritually grown—been transformed. For my present I cannot speak. For my future, it seems I dare not speak.
"Dreams of the future! Exalted visions! Beautiful, unspeakable hopes! Deep, inarticulate longings that fill the conscious soul! Ah! so sweet, so harmonious, so delightful, like an angel, like the bride of the pure and bright soul adorned for the nuptials, do I see the future beckoning me with a clear, transparent smile onward to her presence. 'Ah!' my soul would say, 'we will meet, for I am in thy presence, and faithful in God may heaven grant me to be.' The beauty, the grace, the love, the sweetness that attract me, are beyond all comparison. Ah! thou eternal, ever-blooming virgin, the Future, shall I ever embrace thee? Shall I ever see thee nearer to my heart? I look at myself and I am bowed down low in grief; but when I cast my eyes up to thee, in seeing thee I am lost. The grace and beauty I see in thee passes into my soul, and I am all that thou art. I am then wedded to thee, and I would that it were an eternal union. But ah! my eyes, when turned upon myself, lose all sight of thee, and meet nothing but my own spots and blemishes. How canst thou love me? I say; and for thy pure love I am melted into thee as one."
He continues:
"Lord, let me speak of my many and grievous sins; but oh! when I would do so, my mouth speaks nothing forth but Thy praises.
"I would offer my whole soul afresh to all that is, for the sake of the love of God. . . . Lord, I am Thine, for Thou dost teach me this be Thy unutterable, ever-present love."
"January 3.—Last Saturday my confessor was not at home when I called. I have waited until this morning, the Saturday following. It is sad to me to wait to partake of the Blessed Sacrament. How much joy, love, and sweetness it is to the soul! I feel my soul to glow again with renewed love when I have partaken of the blessed communion of Christ. This is my spiritual food. It is the goodness, mercy, and love of God which keeps me from sadness."
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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. "If we would do humanity any good," he writes in his diary while considering his vocation, "we must act from grounds higher than humanity; our standpoint must be above the race, otherwise how can we actuponhumanity?" He also speaks of the fundamental necessity of "an impulse of divine love" actuating the reformer of social evils. He addresses himself thus: "If thou wouldst move the race to greater good and higher virtue, lose thyself in the Universal. Be so great as to give thyself to something nobler than thyself if thou wouldst be ennobled, immortalized." In many pages of the last two volumes of his diary these notes of sympathetic love for his fellow-men are mingled with yearnings for solitude. "This book," he writes on the last page of one of them, "has answered some little purpose; for when I wanted to speak to some one and yet was alone, it cost me no labor to scribble in it. It would give me great pleasure if I had a friend who would exchange such thoughts with me." He was soon to enter into that spiritual heritage which among its other treasures bestows the beatitude of the sage, "Blessed is the man who hath found a true friend."
Little by little a distinctly penitential mood came over him, and it occupies nearly the whole of the last volume of the diary with the most unreserved expressions of grief for sin, or, rather, for a state of sinfulness, since the specific mention of sins is nearly altogether wanting. We meet with page after page of self-accusation in general terms: "I am in want of greater love for those around me; I perform my spiritual duties too negligently; too little of my time is devoted to spiritual exercises. I feel all over sick with sin! Here is my difficulty, O Lord, and do Thou direct me: I am always in doubt, when I do not think of Thee alone, that I am sinning and that my time is misspent."
His protestations of sorrow are extremely fervent and very numerous; and as the Lent of 1845 approached he records his purpose of restricting himself to one meal a day. As he never ate meat, nor any "product of animal life," and drank only water, his "nuts, bread, and apples" once a day must have been his diet all through the penitential season. The reader will rememberein herrliches Essenat Concord: "bread, maple-sugar, and apples."
In the middle of February he opened his mind more fully to Bishop McCloskey, whom he continually calls his spiritual director. He had now to reveal the discoveries of holy penance, and to add to his other motives for leaving the world the dread of falling into mortal sin. He had, he tells us, misgivings as to whether he was ambitious or not. One of his spiritual states he thus alludes to:
"I will ask my confessor how it is—if it is so with others, that they feel no sense of things, no joy, no reality, no emotion, no impulse, nothing positive within or around," but only the consciousness of the need of a terrible atonement. This is accompanied by frantic prayers to God, invocations of the Blessed Virgin, St. Francis of Assisi and other saints. And he says that he has been told that he is scrupulous, and complains that at confession he can only accuse himself in general terms.
Complete abandonment to the divine will seems to have been the outcome of a season of much distress of soul, and bodily mortification. On April 2 he writes: "The last time I saw my director he spoke to me concerning the sacred ministry, and this is a subject I feel an unspeakable difficulty about. I told him that I desired to place myself wholly in his hands and should do whatever he directed. I do not wish to be any more than nothing. I give myself up. So far the Lord seems to be with me, and I hope that He will not forsake me in the future."
As might have been anticipated, Bishop McCloskey's advice was wise. Plainly, his own hope was that young Hecker should enter the secular priesthood, but there is no evidence in the numerous references to the matter in the diary, that this caused him to do more than make his young friend fully acquainted with that state of life. He had him call at the newly-opened diocesan seminary at Fordham and become acquainted with the professors. Bishop Hughes, whom he also consulted, urged him to go to St. Sulpice in Paris, and to the Propaganda in Rome, and make his studies for the secular priesthood. But they failed to win him to their opinion, and were too enlightened to seek to influence him except by argument. Father Hecker ever held the very highest views on the dignity of the priesthood, considering its vocation second to none. But while he was irresistibly inclined to a state of retirement quite incompatible with the duties of the secular priesthood in America, he also felt the most urgent need of constant advice and companionship for guidance in his interior life. These seemingly contradictory requirements he hoped to find united in a religious community, and Bishop McCloskey emphatically assured him that his anticipations would not be disappointed. In addition to this, Isaac Hecker had at least some premonitions of an apostolic vocation calling for a wider range of activity than can be usually compassed by the diocesan clergy. But we have often heard him say that the immediate impulse which induced his application to be made a Redemptorist was need of "intimate and careful spiritual guidance."
His director therefore became satisfied that he should become a religious, and turned his attention to the Society of Jesus, giving him the lives of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier to read, and, doubtless, answered his inquiries about that order. "But," he said in after years, "I had no vocation to teach young boys and felt unfitted for a student's life"; added to this was the certainty of the postponement of any public activity on his part for many years if he became a Jesuit.
After mentioning that he had read the life of St. Francis Xavier, he says that an acquaintance had written him that a German priest, living in Third Street, wanted to see him. This was one of the Redemptorist Fathers who were newly established in the city. This priest, whose name is not given, undertook to assume direction of Isaac, and was very urgent with him to make a spiritual retreat with a view to deciding his vocation. "He is a very zealous person—too much so it seems to me," is the comment in the diary, and the answer was a refusal. But what he saw in the community pleased and attracted Isaac, for everything was poor and plain, and there was an air of solitude. However, he would by no means change his spiritual adviser, writing, "I strive to follow my spiritual director or else I should be fearful of my state. All my difficulties, sins, and temptations I make him acquainted with. . . . Though the world has no particular hold upon me, I give it up once and for all. It gives me pain to feel my perfect want of faith in myself as being in any way useful."
Meantime, on Trinity Sunday, he had been confirmed with his brother George, whose entrance into the Church is here first indicated; no other member of the family became a Catholic. Isaac took the additional name of Thomas on receiving this sacrament, in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Again he writes:
"I have tried to study to-day, but I cannot. Is it not the business of man to save his own soul, and this before all things? Does the study of Greek and Latin help a soul towards its salvation? Is it not quite a different thing from grace? Sometimes I feel strongly inclined to set aside all study, all reading, as superficial and not so important as contemplation and silence."
The time was coming when the Holy Spirit would do this in spite of him and in a way the reverse of pleasant. Meantime he worked away at his books and attended his classes at Cornelius Institute, which was the name of the private school he had been attending, till July 16, the commencement day. In recording his impressions of the school and the acquaintances there made, he says that with one possible exception the young men were of little interest to him, lacking earnestness of character. He does not name the teachers or give the location of the school. Yet he says his experience there had been useful "and chastened my hopes. I have seen by means of it much more clearly into the workings of Protestantism, its want of deep spirituality, its superficiality, and its inevitable tendency to no-religion."
As may be supposed, his visits to Third Street became frequent, and his acquaintance with the Fathers better established. This was especially true with regard to Father Rumpler, who was rector of the house, a learned and able man and one of mature spirituality. He was a German born and bred, with the hard ideas of discipline peculiar to a class of his countrymen though foreign to the genuine German character. He impressed young Hecker as a sedate man, wise and firm. The friendship then begun was maintained until Father Rumpler was deprived of his reason by an attack of acute mania several years later. But more than the friendship of Rumpler, as far as immediate results were concerned, was the providential circumstance of two other young Americans having applied to join the Redemptorists. To Isaac this was a stimulant of no ordinary power. Like himself, they were converts and very fervent ones; but, unlike him, they had come into the Church from Episcopalianism. Clarence A. Walworth, son of the Chancellor of the State of New York, was a graduate of Union College. He studied law in Albany and practised his profession for a short time, but finally undertook the ministry. After three years in the Episcopal seminary he became a Catholic. Those who know him now can see the tall and graceful youth, pleasing and kindly, with the face and voice and soul of an orator; for the force and charm of youth have not been weakened in receiving the dignity of old age.
James A. McMaster was of Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish parentage. His name is familiar to our readers as editor of theFreeman's Journal.Those qualities of aggressive zeal which made McMaster so well known to Catholics of our day were not wholly undeveloped in the tall, angular youth, still a catechumen, and intoxicated with the new wine of Catholic fervor. Young Mr. Walworth had been made a Catholic but a short time before, and McMaster was received into the Church by the Redemptorists in Third Street, his two young friends being present. While he was kneeling at the altar, candle in hand, piously reading his profession of faith to Father Rumpler, he accidentally set fire to Father Tschenhens' hair, one of the fathers assisting at the ceremony. Walking together afterwards in the little garden of the convent, Father Rumpler said to him: "Mr. McMaster, you begin well—setting fire to a priest." "Oh," answered he, "if I don't set fire to something more than that it will be a pity." These new friends of Isaac had applied to enter the Redemptorist novitiate and they had been accepted. This meant a voyage to Europe, for the congregation had not yet established a novitiate in America.
One Friday, then, during the last days of July—the exact date we have not been able to discover—Isaac Hecker was informed by Father Rumpler that Walworth and McMaster would sail for Belgium the evening of the next day. "I decided to join them," he said when relating the circumstances afterwards. "Father Rumpler was favorable, but puzzled. And I must first present myself to the Provincial, Father de Held, who was in Baltimore. I arrived in Baltimore at four o'clock in the morning on Saturday, travelling all night. Father de Held looked at me, as I presented myself, and said that he must take time to consider. I explained about the departure of the others that day. He ordered Brother Michael to get me a bowl of coffee from the kitchen, and me to hear his Mass. I heard the Mass and after that he examined me a little—asked me to read out of theFollowing of Christin Latin, which I did. He gave me my acceptance, and I rushed back to New York by the half-past eight o'clock morning train. George had packed my trunk, and I sailed that day with the others."
The picturesqueness of the group was certainly not lessened by the accession of Isaac Hecker, whose leap to and from Baltimore, though hardly to be expected from a contemplative, was in accord with the sudden energy of his nature. One who saw him at the time says that "he had the general make-up of a transcendentalist, not excepting his long hair flowing down on his neck."
The ship was an American one named theArgo,and she was bound for London. The voyage was every way pleasant, lasting but twenty-five days from land to land, with bright skies, quiet sea, and fair winds. Their berths were in the waist of the ship, in the second cabin, all the places in the first cabin having been taken; this pleased them well, for they loved the poor man's lot. Isaac's passage money was paid by his brothers, and he was supplied by them and his mother with all sorts of conveniences; and these, of course, he made to conduce to the comfort of the entire party. The lower and larger berth of their little state-room was occupied by Walworth and McMaster, and Isaac took the upper and smaller one. None of them suffered from sea-sickness.
The young pilgrims were overflowing with happiness, as if they were going to the enjoyment of a rich heritage, as, indeed, in a spiritual sense they were. It was a first voyage to the Old World for all of them and they found everything interesting. They made friends with the crew, who were nearly all Yankee sailors, and who struck them as exactly like themselves, except that they were not religious; and they sought entertainment with such of the passengers as were congenial, though in this Isaac Hecker was more ready than his companions. Father Walworth tells an incident characteristic of both himself and his transcendental companion. He was admonishing young Hecker to be more reticent among the crew and was asked why. "You wouldn't like to kneel down and kiss the deck before all those sailors," said Walworth. "Why not?" was the reply. "Then do it." And down dropped Hecker to the deck and kissed it in all simplicity.
They had many topics of interest to occupy their time; Isaac favored such as were philosophical and social, his companions were absorbed by the Tractarian movement, its phases of thought and variety of persons, and all must have had much to tell of friends and relatives whom they hoped soon to see members of the Church. One night the harmony with their fellow-passengers was threatened with rupture. They were much annoyed by a violent dispute about the Trinity carried on in the adjoining cabin far into the night. McMaster finally lost patience, sprang out of bed, rushed among the disputants, and smote the table with a tremendous blow and shouted"Silence!"His remedy was efficacious; the theologians scattered and went to bed.
There was a marked difference between Isaac and his companions in controversial views. All three used their reason with the utmost activity, but he had travelled into the Church by the road of philosophy and they by that of history and Scripture. Their conversation must have been the exchange of intellectual commodities of very different kinds and for that reason expediting a busy commerce. They could profit by his bold and original views of principle and he was in need of their idea of the external integrity of organized religion. Then, too, they had much to say of the future, chiefly by way of conjecture, for no member of the order accompanied them. No one was superior and no superior was needed. As to devotional exercises each suited himself, kneeling down and saying his prayers night and morning and at other times, in his own way and words.
There was also difference in matters of devotion, for Isaac Hecker had little or no religious training, and as to the traditional forms of religious practice he was very backward. The others had long since familiarized themselves with all Catholic usages. Young Walworth taught young Hecker how to say the rosary and initiated him, doubtless, into other common practices, which he assumed with the simplicity and docility of the child of guileless nature that he was.
The ship, as we have said, was bound to London, but our party were too impatient to wait till the end of the voyage and left her at Portsmouth in the pilot's boat; the sea was running high, but so were their spirits, and although the boat was tossed about in a way to scare a landsman, they gladly went ashore and took the cars to London. We have before us a letter from Isaac Hecker to his brothers, dated the 29th of August, saying that they had been in London three days after a pleasant voyage, and expressing deep joy at nearing the place of retirement and prayer for which he had been longing. He asks them to write to Brownson and especially to assure his mother of his happiness.
McMaster insisted on visiting Newman at Littlemore, and afterwards gave a glowing account of his visit. He had been received by the great man, who did not enter the Church till a few months later, with the utmost kindness. He found him standing in his library, reading a book. He asked many questions about the tendency of men's minds in America, and was especially interested in Arthur Carey, with whose influence among American Episcopalians and early death the reader has been made acquainted. They lodged at a decent little inn over a pastry cook's shop and did not go sight-seeing to any extent. McMaster's companions did not wait for his return from Oxford, but when the packet sailed for Antwerp, which was Sunday, the 30th of August, they went down to Folkestone and took passage. They arrived the following morning, and, armed with a letter from Father Rumpler to a Madame Marchand, a warm friend of the congregation, they went straight to the nearest Church to inquire the way to her house. It happened to be the Jesuit church, and one of the fathers kindly guided them to the lady's house. She was delighted to serve them; gave them an excellent dinner, and, after they had visited Rubens' great picture, the Descent from the Cross, set them forth on their journey; but the "yea, yea and nay, nay" of Scripture, or ratherjah, jah, nein, nein,was their only conversation with the good lady, for although young Walworth could speak French and Isaac German, she knew nothing but Flemish. Distances are not great in little Belgium, and so before night they were at St. Trond, a little city about thirty-five miles southeast of Antwerp and twenty miles from Liège. Here they were soon joined by Mr. McMaster, and their novitiate began. Isaac Hecker was now twenty-five years and nine months old.
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THE Redemptorist novitiate at St. Trond, as well as the house of studies at Wittem, Holland, had been established be the immediate disciples of St. Clement Hofbauer. That great servant of God had introduced the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer into Austria and other parts of Germany several years before the time of which we write. A saint himself, and of wonderful missionary gifts, he was worthy of the title of second founder of the order of St. Alphonsus Liguori. St. Clement was the son of a Moravian peasant, and in early life had been a baker by trade. St. Alphonsus was still alive when Clement, while on a pilgrimage to Rome, was enrolled there in the Redemptorist novitiate. This event was auspicious of the future of the entire community, since his apostolate was the means of propagating the order among the northern nations, and giving to it some of its present dominant characteristics of Teutonic discipline; whereas in the land of its origin it has never fully recovered from the disasters which befell it during the lifetime of its founder. In Germany and the Low Countries, on the other hand, the children of St. Alphonsus and St. Clement were, at the time when the three Americans joined them, the most powerful preachers in the Church. Their vocation called them to give missions—spiritual exercises lasting from a week to a month—to the faithful in every part of Catholic Europe, not excepting France. Their fame was established as the foremost preachers of penance and of the Redeemer's love for sinners.
St. Trond was the novitiate of the Belgian Province, which embraced Belgium and Holland as well as the newly established convents in England and America. The Provincial was Father de Held, whom we saw in Baltimore while he was there on a tour of inspection of the American houses. He was an Austrian German, a man of noble presence, matured spirituality and an accomplished missionary. Father Hecker knew him well in after years, and always counted him as one who understood his spirit and approved his aspirations.
The convent in St. Trond was in a narrow street of the quaint little city; so narrow, indeed, that one almost fancied that he could touch both walls by stretching out his arms. It was a solid old structure, built in the first half of the fifteenth century by St. Colette for her Poor Clares, an ample guarantee of its conformity to the ideas of religious poverty. It was not architecturally fine, but was a curious and interesting building. Isaac in one of his letters home says that the house was very roomy, with long corridors having cells on each side. It abutted on a church which was open to the public and served by the fathers; a window in the convent chapel looked into the sanctuary. Attached to the house was a garden of three or four acres.
The country around the town is a typical Flemish landscape, flat, fertile, thickly dotted with farm buildings, and highly cultivated. The people are wholly Catholic. The town is an old one, and in its time has had some military importance. Our young novices often walked upon the ramparts which encircled it. In the neighborhood are structures which were built before the Christian era; quite near by was one of Cæsar's round towers, as well as the deserted ruins of an ancient city named Leo. Curious old churches and monasteries might often be seen by the novices on their long walks into the country. All this antiquity was the more pleasing to the American novices because in their own land the forests, the rivers, and the everlasting hills are all that represent the distant past.
Besides twenty novices there were ten or twelve fathers at St. Trond, who either served the church or went about on missions; and there were also a number of lay brothers. By nationality the greater portion of the novices were Belgians and Hollanders, the others being mostly Germans. The language of the house was French, though Latin was sometimes used. Of course this was an added difficulty to Brother Hecker, as he was now called, for he knew practically nothing of that language, though he had studied it a little. But he attacked it resolutely and, as one of his companions said, learned it heels over head. He never feared to make mistakes, nor dreaded a smile at his expense, and as a consequence was soon able to talk to any one. But his French was always curious, and when he took his turn at reading during meals he gave the community some hearty laughs.
All the new-comers were invested with the Redemptorist habit about three weeks after their arrival, in September, 1845. "You can scarce imagine the happiness I felt on my arrival here," he writes to his mother in his first letter home. "For three days my heart was filled with joy and gladness. I was like one who had been transported to a lovelier, a purer, and a better world." He tells her that he had waited for a fortnight before writing, to learn the place, and then, after expressing his satisfaction with everything in such sentences as the above, he fills the rest of the letter with arguments in favor of the Catholic Church and exhortations to join it. Such was the burden of all of his letters home from both St. Trond and Wittem. We have ten written from the novitiate. An exception must be made as to one which describes in detail the daily order of life in the novitiate. It is addressed to his mother.
He tells her that the first bell rings at half-past four in the morning and the last at half-past nine at night. The time is divided between various common and private devotional exercises, including Mass, meditations, recitation of the office in common, study of the rule of the order, spiritual conferences, spiritual reading, and the like. Silence is broken only for an hour after dinner and another hour after supper. About an hour of out-door exercise is taken every day, and a long walk once a week and on feast-days. All of Thursday in each week and the more important feasts of the year are days of recreation, when silence need not be observed during the greater part of the day, and much relaxation is otherwise allowed. All Fridays are days of total silence and special devotion. The letter fails to mention the discipline, or flagellation, which was taken twice a week.
He ends thus: "The time of the novitiate is one year, and its object is to prove our vocation, and form the religious character—the heart. The exercises may seem too many to you, but to us they are quite otherwise. Their frequent changes prevent them from being monotonous, and their variety makes them agreeable. Our time passes without our taking count of it, and our joy is that of a pure conscience, and our happiness that of a clean heart."
It might seem a matter of peculiar difficulty for a free nature like Isaac Hecker's to conform to the stiff rules of such a system. But this was not the case, and a closer look into the matter shows that such a regimen is of much use to an earnest man, however free his character, at the outset of his spiritual career. Experience proves that one test of the genuineness of the interior disposition to serve God perfectly is readiness to surrender exterior peculiarities. There is nothing in the special graces of God which should hinder a placid acceptance of the routine of a novitiate. The merging of individual conduct into the common custom is the contribution which community life must exact from every member. If a man is to be a hermit he may act from individual impulses alone, though, even so, rarely without counsel. But if one would live and work with others, special graces and individual traits of character must not be allowed to interfere with a certain degree of uniformity. On the other hand, that uniformity should not be allowed to cripple the spontaneous action of natural independence, and the inspiration of graces which are personal.
It must be granted that with many souls a novitiate will tend to a routine use of religious aids. Yet it cannot be denied that its discipline forcibly concentrates the scattered purposes of life into one powerful stream. It contributes to symmetry of character. It furnishes efficacious tests of sincerity. It drills disorderly natures into regularity. It acquaints the beginner with the literature of his holy profession, and herein it is of priceless worth. And finally, it provides advisers of approved wisdom during the period of the spiritual life when counsel is most needed, as well as most gratefully accepted. But if it fails in each of these particulars, as no doubt it sometimes does, the novitiate may be said never to fail in detecting an inaptitude for the common life, if such exists; that is to say, a serious lack of the qualities which fit one to get along in peace with the brethren.
Into the novitiates of the religious orders, and into the seminaries which hold their place for the secular priesthood, the noblest men of our race have entered joyfully; some to be wedded to the Divine Spouse in the quiet seclusion of holy contemplation, and others, of the more militant orders, to be trained to follow worthily the standards of the apostolic warfare against vice and error.
The novice-master was puzzled by his three Americans, though Brother McMaster was easily comprehended—an over-frank temperament, impulsive, and demonstrative. Not only were his banners always hanging on the outward wall, but his plan of campaign also. The other two were a study, and Brother Hecker was a curiosity. Yet both were cheerful, obedient, earnest, courageous. The novice-master was annoyed at the Americans' incessant demand for the reason why of all things permitted, and the reason why not of all things prohibited; until at last Brother Walworth was named Brother Pourquoi. As to Brother Hecker, besides showing the same stand-and-deliver propensity, he occupied much of the time of conversation in philosophizing, plunging into the obscurest depths of metaphysical and ethical problems, using terms which were often quite unfamiliar to strictly orthodox ears, and exhibiting a fearless independence of thought generally conceded among Catholics only to practised theologians. Yet the novice-master was well pleased with both, though we shall see that his journey with Brother Hecker was for some time in the dark.
When the Fourth of July came around he learned that it was the great American holiday, and he called the three Americans to him and asked, "How do you celebrate your national holiday at home?" "By shooting off fire-crackers," they answered with a twinkle. This being out of the question, and the grand military parade which was next suggested also impracticable, Brothers Walworth and Hecker both exclaimed, "Ginger-bread!" "Take all you want," was the answer, "and go off on a long walk, and spend the day by yourselves." And of they went to wander among the ruins of the outposts of the old Roman republic, and make Fourth of July speeches in honor of the great new Republic beyond the sea. Those who have been novices themselves will not be surprised at the boyishness of these three manly characters under the circumstances.
Isaac Hecker's spirit was not anywise cramped by the routine exercises of the novitiate; he made them easily and well. He always seemed to his companions what he actually was, and what he described himself to be in his letters to New York, a cheerful and contented novice. But, as one of them since expressed it, he was not a "dude" novice, not the very pink of external perfection, and had a long period of interior trial. He did not exhibit at any time the least hesitancy about his vocation, for his mind was made up. Yet once, when he took a walk with Brother Walworth to visit a house of Recollects, Franciscans of the strict observance, both he and his companion were greatly struck by that charming poverty which the poor man of Assisi has bequeathed to his children; they did ask each other whether they had not made a mistake. This question, however, was but the expression of a shadowy doubt, vanishing as suddenly as it had come.
The novice-master was Father Othmann, and he was by universal testimony entirely competent for his place. He was himself the novitiate. Its austerities, and they were not trifling, its long and frequent prayer, its total seclusion from the world, all were refined and adjusted to each one by passing through his soul and being dispensed by his wisdom. Father Hecker regarded him as a very remarkable man. He was a student of character, and wise and sagacious in varying the application of religious influences according to temperament and spiritual gifts. Under him the danger of formalism, which occurs to one's mind immediately as the incessant round of exercises is mentioned, was rendered remote; for he gave his instructions, and especially used the chapter of faults, in a way to infuse into the souls of the novices the ever-recurring freshness of individual initiative. His model (after St. Alphonsus) was St. Francis de Sales. He followed him constantly in his doctrine and methods, and often spoke of him and quoted him. Of other methods and their advocates he spoke respectfully, but, however much they were in vogue, he did not follow them. Brother Hecker was a faithful student in his school and learned much from Father Othmann. The latter especially insisted on the principle of accepting Providence as the chief dispenser of mortifications. He had no objection to self-imposed spiritual exercises, but he did not positively favor them. He taught his young men that the traditional practices of devout souls as embraced in the routine of the novitiate, were good mainly to break the resistance of corrupt nature and render their souls pliant subjects of the Divine guidance in the interior life, as well as submissive to the order of God in the events of His external Providence.
The assistant novice-master, who took Father Othmann's place during his absence, was a Walloon. His name we have been unable to discover, but he was a holy priest, held up to the novices as their model and esteemed by them as the saint of the novitiate. He was a very pleasant man withal, and no doubt added in every way to the fruits of the long year of spiritual trial.
When Isaac Hecker presented himself as a novice he took his place among the youths learning the A, B, C of the spiritual life, while he himself had experienced for many months the most rare dealings of the Holy Ghost with the soul. This could not fail to come to the knowledge of Father Othmann, and, taken with the other peculiarities of his subject, to elicit his most skilful treatment. "Père Othmann, my novice-master," said Father Hecker, in after years, "had a right to be puzzled by me, and so he watched me more than he did the others." He watched and studied him and gradually applied the two sovereign tests of genuine spirituality, obedience and humiliation. These were all the more efficacious in this case, because Brother Hecker was a man of great native independence of character and naturally of an extremely sensitive disposition.
Such was the common austerity of the life that it took some ingenuity to inflict on a novice a mortification which had not grown stale by use in the case of one or more of the others. But in searching the interior of the soul the director could find tender places into which his weapon would be plunged to the bone. But it is more than probable that he misunderstood Brother Hecker, and that for a time he even suspected him of being under delusions. For several months, at any rate, he treated him at his weekly confession with the utmost rigor, producing indescribable mental agony. Many years afterwards, and when near his death, Father Hecker once said to the writer: "While I was kneeling among the novices, outside Père Othmann's room, waiting to go to confession, I often begged of God that it might be His will that I should die before my turn came, so dreadful an ordeal had confession become on account of the severity of the novice-master." Yet, as recorded in the memoranda, the victim was eager for the sacrifice when the knife was not actually lifted over him. "I begged the novice-master," he said on another occasion, "to watch me carefully, and when he saw me bent on anything to thwart me. I did not know any other way of overcoming my nature. He took me at my word, too. For example, once a week only we had a walk, a good long one, and we enjoyed it, and it was necessary for us. I enjoyed it very much indeed. So, sometimes when we were starting out, my thoughts bounding with the anticipated pleasure, he would stop me midway on the stairs: 'Frère Hecker,' he would say, 'please remain at home, and instead of the walk wash and clean the stair-way.' It would nearly kill me to obey, such was my disappointment, grief, humiliation."
In conjunction with these trials from without came a recurrence of resistless interior impulses. "During my novitiate," he is recorded as saying in 1885, "I found myself under impulses of grace which it seemed to me impossible to resist. One was to conquer the tendency to sleep. I slept on boards or on the floor. After a while I was able to do with five hours sleep, and often with only three, in the twenty-four. Père Othmann was not unwilling for me to follow these impulses as soon as he became convinced of their imperative strength. Yet I now see that such practices were in a certain sense mistaken. They necessarily consumed in mortification vitality that I could now use, if I had it, in a more useful way. Still, how could I help it?"