"". . . He is very shortsighted, however, who thinks that a majority of the people, where universal suffrage exists, will submit long to a state of toil and mendicity. The majority would soon learn to exercise its political rights, and command its representatives to carry the laws abolishing primogeniture and entails one step further, and stop all devises of land and prohibit it from being an article of sale. (In a foot-note of the editorial:) We actually heard these and several such propositions discussed by a number of apparently very intelligent mechanics, after the adjournment of a meeting called to consider the subject of wages, rents, etc."
"At that time the main question was the condition of the public finances, and our agitation was directed chiefly against granting charters to private banks of circulation. We condemned these as monopolies, for we were hostile to all monopolies--that is to say, to the use of public funds or the enjoyment of public exclusive privileges by any man or a.s.sociation or cla.s.s of men for their private profit."
We interrupt our direct quotation from this article in order to relate one of the humors of the period, so far as these brothers were concerned, in the words of the late Mr. George Hecker:
"When we were bakers the money in common use was the old-fashioned paper issued by private banks under State charters. We were regularly against it. So we bought a hand printing-press and set it up in the garret of our establishment. All the bills we received from our customers, some thousands sometimes every week, we smoothed out and put in a pile, and then printed on their backs a saying we took from Daniel Webster (though I believe it was not quite authentic): "Of all the contrivances to impoverish the laboring cla.s.ses of mankind, paper money is the most effective. It fertilizes the rich man"s field with the poor man"s sweat." They tried to punish us for defacing money, but we beat them. We didn"t deface it; we only printed something on the back of it. Isaac and I often worked all night putting up handbills for our meetings, for in those days there were no professional bill-posters."
Father" Hecker"s acquaintance with Dr. Brownson, which had so powerful an effect upon his future career, began in 1834, when Brownson was invited to lecture in New York in favor of the principles and aims of this party. Isaac was then in his fifteenth year. Among the conversations recorded in the memoranda we find this reference to their earliest interview:
"I first met Dr. Brownson in New York, in our house. I was then reading the Washington _Globe,_ Benton"s speeches, Calhoun"s, etc.
The elder Blair was its editor; its motto was, "The world is governed too much"--a motto in whose spirit there could be no great movement except in the way of revolution. After the establishment of the American Government the principle expressed in that motto could only be abandoned or pushed into revolution and anarchy.
"I put this question to Brownson: "How can I become certain of the objective reality of the operations of my soul?" He answered: "If you have not yet reached that period of mental life, you will do so before many years."
"It is a great humiliation for me to admit that I was ever in a state in which I doubted the actual validity of the testimony of my own faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence. I had begun my mental life in politics, and in a certain sense in religion; but to my philosophical life I was yet unborn."
In the article on the "Workingman"s Party," already quoted from, Father Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to lecture before the New York members of the party for several years, goes on as follows:
"If it be asked why a man like Dr. Brownson, a born philosopher, should have thus busied himself with the solution of the most practical of problems by undertaking to abolish inequality among men, the answer is plain. The true philosopher will not confine himself to abstract theories. But, furthermore, Brownson at this epoch of his life had lost his grip on the philosophy that leads men to trust in a supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man who does not look to the hope of a future state of beat.i.tude for the chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end. If a man does not seek beat.i.tude in G.o.d he seeks it in himself and his fellow-men--in the highest earthly development of our better nature if he becomes a socialist of one school, and in the l.u.s.ts of the animal man if he becomes a socialist of the brutal school. The man who has any sympathy in his heart and is not guided by Catholic ethics, if he reasons at all on public affairs, will become a socialist of some school or other. Says Dr. Brownson in _The Convert,_ p. 101:
"The end of man, as disclosed by my creed of 1829, is obviously an earthly end, to be attained in this life. Man was not made for G.o.d, and destined to find his beat.i.tude in the possession of G.o.d his Supreme Good, the Supreme Good itself. His end was happiness--not happiness in G.o.d, but in the possession of the good things of this world. Our Lord had said, "Be not anxious as to what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed; for after all these things do the heathen seek." I gave Him a flat denial, and said, Be anxious; labor especially for these things, first for yourselves, then for others. Enlarging, however, my views a little, I said, Man"s end for which he is to labor is the well-being and happiness of man in this world--is to develop man"s whole nature, and so to organize society and government as to secure all men a paradise on the earth. This view of the end to labor for I held steadily and without wavering from 1828 till 1842, when I began to find myself tending unconsciously towards the Catholic Church."
"The reader will have seen by the extracts given that we were a party full of enthusiasm. I was but fifteen when our party called Dr.
Brownson to deliver the lectures above mentioned. But my brothers and I had long been playing men"s parts in politics. I remember when eleven years of age, or a year or two older, being tall for my years, proposing and carrying through a series of resolutions on the currency question at our ward meetings. As our name indicates-- "Workingman"s Democracy"--we were a kind of Democrats. As to the Whig party, it received no great attention from us. At that time its chances of getting control of this State or of the United States were remote. Our biggest fight was against the "usages of the party" as in vogue in the so-called regular Democracy embodied in the Tammany Hall party. This organization undertook to absorb us when we had grown too powerful to be ignored. They nominated a legislative ticket made up half of their men and half of ours. This move was to a great extent successful; but many of us who were purists refused to compromise, and ran a stump ticket, or, as it was then called, a rump ticket. I was too young to vote, but I remember my brother George and I posting political handbills at three o"clock in the morning; this hour was not so inconvenient for us, for we were bakers. We also worked hard on election day, keeping up and supplying the ticket booths, especially in our own ward, the old Seventh. I remember that one of our leaders was a shoemaker named John Ryker, and that we used to meet in Science Hall, Broome Street.
"If this was the high state of my enthusiasm, so was it that of us all. Our political faith was ardent and active. But if we had been tested on our religious faith we should not have come off creditably; many of us had not any religion at all. I remember saying once to my brother John that the only difference between a believer and an infidel is a few ounces of brains. . . . We were a queer set of cranks when Dr. Brownson brought to us his powerful and eloquent advocacy, his contribution of mingled truth and error. He delivered his first course of lectures in the old Stuyvesant Inst.i.tute in Broadway, facing Bond Street--the same hall used a little afterwards by the Unitarian Society while they were building a church for Mr.
Dewey in Broadway opposite Eighth Street, the very same society now established in Lexington Avenue, with Mr. Collyer as minister. The subsequent courses were delivered in Clinton Hall, corner of Na.s.sau and Beekman, the site now occupied by one of our modern mammoth buildings. I forget how much we were charged admission, except that a ticket for the whole course cost three dollars. There was no great rush, but the lectures drew well and abundantly paid all expenses including the lecturer"s fee. The press did not take much notice of the lectures, for the Workingman"s party had no newspapers expressly in its favor, except the one I have already quoted from. But he was one of the few men whose power is great enough to advertise itself.
Wherever he was he was felt. His tread was heavy and he could make way for himself.
"Dr. Brownson was then in the very prime of manhood. He was a handsome man, tall, stately, and of grave manners. His face was clean-shaved. The first likeness of him that I remember appeared in the _Democratic Review._ It made him look like Proudhon, the French Socialist. This was all the more singular because at that time he was really the American Proudhon, though he never went so far as _"La propriete, c"est le vol."_ As he appeared on the platform and received our greeting he was indeed a majestic man, displaying in his demeanor the power of a mind altogether above the ordinary. But he was essentially a philosopher, and that means that he could never be what is called popular. He was an interesting speaker, but he never sought popularity. He never seemed to care much about the reception his words received, but he exhibited anxiety to get his thoughts rightly expressed and to leave no doubt about what his convictions were. Yet among a limited cla.s.s of minds he always awakened real enthusiasm--among minds, that is, of a philosophical tendency. He never used ma.n.u.script or notes; he was familiar with his topic, and his thoughts flowed out spontaneously in good, pure, strong, forcible English. He could control any reasonable mind, for he was a man of great thoughts and never without some grand truth to impart. But to stir the emotions was not in his power, though he sometimes attempted it; he never succeeded in being really pathetic.
"It must be remembered that although Dr. Brownson was technically cla.s.sed among the reverends, he was not commonly so called. It may be said that he was still reckoned among the Unitarian ministry, owing mostly to his connection with Dr. Channing, of Boston, who took a great interest in the Workingman"s party. But I do not think he was advertised by us as reverend or publicly spoken of as a clergyman. He may have been yet hanging on the skirts of the Unitarian movement.
But his career had become political, and his errand to New York was political. He had given up preaching for some years, and embarked on the stormy waves of social politics, and had by his writings become an expositor of various theories of social reform, chiefly those of French origin. So that the dominant note of his lectures was not by any means religious, but political. He was at that time considered as identified with the Workingman"s party, and came to New York to speak as one of our leaders. The general trend of his lectures was the philosophy of history as it bears on questions of social reform. At bottom his theories were Saint-Simonism, the object being the amelioration of the condition of the most numerous cla.s.ses of society in the speediest manner. _This was the essence to our kind of Democracy._ And Dr. Brownson undertook in these lectures to bring to bear in favor of our purpose the life-lessons of the providential men of human history. Of course, the life and teachings of our Saviour Jesus Christ were brought into use, and the upshot of the lecturer"s thesis was that Christ was the big Democrat and the Gospel was the true Democratic platform!
"We interpreted Christianity as altogether a social inst.i.tution, its social side entirely overlapping and hiding the religious. Dr.
Brownson set out to make, and did make, a powerful presentation of our Lord as the representative of the Democratic side of civilization. For His person and office he and all of us had a profound appreciation and sympathy, but it was not reverential or religious; the religious side of Christ"s mission was ignored. Christ was a social Democrat, Dr. Brownson maintained, and he and many of us had no other religion but the social theories we drew from Christ"s life and teaching; that was the meaning of Christianity to us, and of Protestantism especially."
In penning the reminiscences just given Father Hecker probably had in mind the whole period lying between his fourteenth year and his twenty-first. In the autumn of 1834, when he first made acquaintance with Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker was not yet fifteen, while the reform lecturer was in his early thirties. But the boy who began at once, as he has told us, to put philosophical questions, and to seek a test whereby to determine the validity of his mental processes, was already well known to the voters of his ward, not merely as an overgrown and very active lad, always on hand at the polling booths, and ready for any work which might be entrusted to a boy, but also as a clear and persuasive speaker on various topics of social and political reform.
Politics of the kind into which the young Heckers threw themselves so ardently were not very different in their methods fifty years ago from what they are to-day. Reform politics are always the reverse of what are called machine politics. The meetings of which Father Hecker speaks were spontaneous gatherings of determined and earnest men, young and old, held sometimes in public halls, sometimes, when elections were close at hand, in the open street. Often they were dominated by leaders better able to formulate theories than to bring about practical remedial measures. The inception of all great parties has something of this character. It generally happens that principles are dwelt upon with an exclusive devotion more or less prejudicial to immediate practical ends. This is why young men, and even striplings, provided they are energetic and persuasive, will be listened to with attention at such eras. Men are seeking for enlightenment, and hence views are taken for what they seem to be worth rather than out of respect for the source they spring from. Imagine, then, this tall, fair, strong-faced boy of fourteen, mounted, perhaps, on one of his own flour-barrels, dogmatizing the principles of social democracy, posing as a spontaneous political reformer before a crowded street full of men twice and thrice his years, but bound together with him by the sympathies common to the wage-earning cla.s.ses. It is true that Isaac Hecker and his brothers, of whom the eldest had but recently attained to the dignity of a voter, although still poor and hard-working, had already, by virtue of sheer industry and pluck, pa.s.sed over to the cla.s.s of wage-payers. But they were not less ardent reformers after than before that transition. Isaac at all events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind.
Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice, and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local management of his party. In the article already quoted from, he tells us that after 1834 the managers left all future engagements of lecturers to his brother John and himself. It was doubtless this fact which led directly to that lasting and fruitful intimacy with Dr.
Brownson which then began. His was the strongest purely human influence, if we except his mother"s, which Isaac Hecker ever knew.
And these two were on planes so different that it is hardly fair to compare them with each other.
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CHAPTER III
THE TURNING-POINT
A BRIEF consideration at this point of a certain permanent tendency of Father Hecker"s mind will be of present and future value to the student of his life. It has been said already that he never changed the principles he had adopted as a lad among the apprentices and journeymen of New York; principles which, for all social politics, he summarized in the homely expression, "I am always for the under dog."
Thus, in the article quoted in the preceding chapter, he had the right to say of himself and his a.s.sociates:
"We were guileless men absorbed in seeking a solution for the problems of life. Nor, as social reformers at least, were we given over to theories altogether wrong. The constant recurrence of similar epochs of social agitation since then, and the present enormous development of the monopolies which we resisted in their very infancy, show that our forecast of the future was not wholly visionary. The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within the easy reach of State and national authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order."
We dwell on his political consistency, however, only because it affords an evidence of that unity of character which was always recognized in Father Hecker by those who knew him best. Change in him, in whatever direction it seemed to proceed, meant primarily the dropping off of accidental excrescences. There was nothing radical in it. What he once held with the settled allegiance of his intelligence he held always, adding to or developing it further as fast as the clouds were blown away from his mental horizon. From the standpoint of personal experience he could fairly criticise, as he did in conversation some few years before his death, Cardinal Newman"s dictum that "conversion is a leap in the dark." "I say," he went on, "that it is a leap in the light." _"Into_ the light, but through the dark," was suggested in reply.
"No," he answered. "If one arrives at a recognition of the truth of Catholic doctrine through one or other form of Protestant orthodoxy, then the difficulties of ordinary controversy will indeed leave him to the very end in the dark. But if he comes to the Church through the working and the results of natural reason, it is light all the way, and to the very end. I had this out with Cardinal Newman personally, and he agreed that I was right."
It is true that his views were rectified when he entered the Church, and that when once in it he was ever acquiring new truth and new views of truth. But his character never changed. He was a luminous example of the truth of the saying that the child is father to the man, so often apparently falsified by experience. Boy and man, the prominent characteristic of his mind was a clear perception of fundamentals and a disregard of non-essentials in the whole domain of life. To reverse a familiar maxim, "Take care of the dollars and the cents will take care of themselves," might describe his plan of mental economy. To the small coin of discussion in any field of inquiry he paid little attention. One who knew him many years has often heard him say, "Emphasize the universal always."
He was a teacher by natural vocation. No sooner was he satisfied that he knew anything of general moment than he felt pressed to impart his knowledge. Contact with him could never be simply for acquaintance"
sake; still less for an idle comparison of views. While no man could be more frank in the admission of a lack of data on which to base an opinion in matters of fact, or a lack of illumination on affairs of conduct or practical direction, when such existed, yet to be certain was, to him, the self-luminous guarantee of his mission to instruct.
But until that certainty was attained, in a manner satisfactory to both the intellectual and the ethical sides of his nature, he was silent.
As a priest, though he undertook to teach anybody and everybody, yet he could seldom have given the impression of desiring to impose his personal views, simply as such. His vital perception that there can be nothing private in truth shone through his speech too plainly for so gross a misconception to be easily made by candid minds. The fact is that the community of spiritual goods was vividly realized by him, and in good faith he credited all men with a longing like his own to see things as they really are. As he had by nature a very kindly manner, benignant and cheerful, the average man readily submitted to his influence. In his prime he was always a most successful and popular preacher and lecturer, from the combined effect of this earnestness of conviction and his personal magnetic quality. Men whose mental characteristics resembled his became, soon or late, his enthusiastic disciples, and as to others, although at first some were inclined to suspect him, many of them ended by becoming his warm friends.
It is in this light that we must view the precocious efforts of the young politician. Nothing was further from his thoughts at any time than to employ politics as a means to any private end. Although we have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature--a Stoic, not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader will see this more clearly as we pa.s.s on to the succeeding phases of Father Hecker"s interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even here without explaining that we use the word ascetic in its proper sense, to connote the rightful dominance of reason over appet.i.te, the supremacy of the higher over the lower; not the jurisdiction of the judge over the criminal. In his case, during the greater part of his life, the adjustment of the higher and lower, the restraint he placed upon the beast in view of the elevation due to the man, was neither conceived nor felt as punitive. We shall see later on how G.o.d finally subjected him to a discipline so corrective as to be acknowledged by him as judicial.
Isaac Hecker threw himself into public questions, then, because, being a workman, he believed he saw ways by which the working cla.s.ses might be morally and socially elevated. He wanted for his cla.s.s what he wanted for himself. To get his views into shape, to press them with all his force whenever and wherever an opportunity presented itself, was for him the inescapable consequence of that belief. Like his great patron, St. Paul, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" was always his first question after his own illumination had been granted. There is a note in the collection of private memoranda that has been preserved, in which, alluding to the painful struggles which preceded his clear recognition that the doctrines of the Catholic Church afforded the adequate solution of all his difficulties, he says that his interior sufferings were so great that the question with him was "whether I should drown myself in the river or drown my longings and doubts in a career of wild ambition." Still, to those who knew him well, it is impossible to think of him as ever capable of any ambition which had not an end commensurate with mankind itself. To elevate men, to go up with them, not above them, was, from first to last, the scope of his desire. The nature of his surroundings in youth, his personal experience of the hardships of the poorer cla.s.ses, his intercourse with radical socialists, together with the incomplete character of the religious training given him, made him at first look on politics as a possible and probable means to this desirable end. But he was too sensibly impelled by the Divine impulse toward personal perfection, and too inflexibly honest with himself, not to come early to a thorough realization, on one hand of the fact that man cannot, unaided, rise above his natural level, and, on the other, that no conceivable amelioration of merely social conditions could satisfy his aspirations. And if not his, how those of other men?
One thing that becomes evident in studying this period of Isaac Hecker"s life is the fact that his acquaintance with Dr. Brownson marks a turning-point in his views, his opinions, his whole att.i.tude of mind toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then the Saviour of men had been represented to him exclusively as a remedy against the fear of h.e.l.l; His use seemed to be to furnish a Divine point to which men might work themselves up by an emotional process resulting in an a.s.surance of forgiveness of sin and a secure hope of heaven.
Christianity, that is to say, had been presented to him under the form of Methodism. The result had been what might have been antic.i.p.ated in a nature so averse to emotional excitement and possessing so little consciousness of actual sin. Drawn to G.o.d as he had always been by love and aspiration, he was not as yet sensible of any gulf which needed to be bridged between him and his Creator; hence, to present Christ solely as the Victim, the Expiatory Sacrifice demanded by Divine Justice, was to make Him, if not impossible, yet premature to a person like him. Meantime, what he saw and heard all around him, poverty, inequality, greed, shiftlessness, low views of life, ceaseless and poorly remunerated toil, made incessant demands upon him. These things he knew by actual contact, by physical, mental, and moral experience, as a man knows by touch and taste and smell. Men"s sufferings, longings, struggles, disappointments had been early thrust upon him as a personal and most weighty burden; and the only relief yet offered was the Christ of emotional Methodism. To a nature more open to temptation on its lower side, and hence more conscious of its radical limitations, even this defective presentation of the Redeemer of men might have appealed profoundly. But Isaac Hecker"s problems were at this time mainly social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it has from the beginning most vehemently rejected. As a negative force its essence is a protest against organic Christianity. As a positive force it is simply men, taken one by one, dealing separately with G.o.d concerning matters strictly personal. True, it is a fundamental verity that men must deal individually with G.o.d; but the external test that their dealings with Him have been efficacious, and their inspirations valid, is furnished by the fact of their incorporation into the organic life of Christendom. As St. Paul expresses it: "For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, are yet one body, so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free, and in one Spirit have we all been made to drink."*
[* I Cor. 12:12, 13.]
It is plain, then, that a religion such as Protestantism, which is unsocial and disintegrating by virtue of its antagonistic forces, can contribute little to the solution of social problems. Even when not actively rejected by men deeply interested in such problems, it is tolerably sure that it will be practically ignored as a working factor in their public relations with their fellows. Religion will remain the narrowly personal matter it began; chiefly an affair for Sundays; best attended to in one"s pew in church or at the family altar. Probably it may reach the shop, the counter, and the scales; not so certainly the factory, the mine, the political platform, and the ballot. If Christianity had never presented itself under any other aspect than this to Isaac Hecker, it is certain that it would never have obtained his allegiance. Yet it is equally certain that he never rejected Christ under any aspect in which He was presented to him.
Even concerning the period of his life with which we are now engaged, and in which we have already represented him as having lost hold of all distinctively Christian doctrines, we must emphasize the precise words we have employed. He "lost hold"; that was because his original grasp was weak. While no authoritative dogmatic teaching had given him an even approximately full and definite idea of the G.o.d-man, His personality, His character, and His mission, the fragmentary truths offered him had made His influence seem restrictive rather than liberative of human energies. Yet even so he had not deliberately turned his back upon Him, though his tendency at this time was doubtless toward simple Theism. He had begun to ignore Christianity, simply because his own problems were dominantly social, and orthodox Protestantism, the only form of religion which he knew, had no social force corresponding to its pretensions and demands.
Now, upon this state of mind the teaching of Dr. Brownson came like seed upon a fallow soil. Like that which preceded it, it erred rather by defect than by actual or, at any rate, by wilful deviation from true doctrine. Isaac Hecker met for the first time in Orestes Brownson an exponent of Jesus Christ as the great Benefactor and Uplifter of the human race in this present life. Dr. Brownson has himself given a statement of the views which he held and inculcated between 1834 and 1843--which includes the period we are at present considering--and it is so brief and to the point that we cannot do better than to quote it:
"I found in me," he writes (_The Convert,_p. 111), "certain religious sentiments that I could not efface; certain religious beliefs or tendencies, of which I could not divest myself. I regarded them as a law of my nature, as natural to man, as the n.o.blest part of our nature, and as such I cherished them; _but as the expression in me of an objective world, I seldom pondered them._ I found them universal, manifesting themselves, in some form, wherever man is found; but I received them, _or supposed I received them,_ on the authority of humanity or human nature, and professed to hold no religion except that of humanity. I had become a believer in humanity, and put humanity in the place of G.o.d. The only G.o.d I recognized was the divine in man, the divinity of humanity, one alike with G.o.d and with man, which I supposed to be the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the mystery of Emmanuel, or G.o.d with us--G.o.d manifest in the flesh. There may be an unmanifested G.o.d, and certainly is; but the only G.o.d who exists for us is the G.o.d in man, the active and living principle of human nature.
"I regarded Jesus Christ as divine in the sense in which all men are divine, and human in the sense in which all men are human. I took him as my model man, and regarded him as a moral and social reformer, who sought, by teaching the truth under a religious envelope, and practising the highest and purest morality, to meliorate the earthly condition of mankind; but I saw nothing miraculous in his conception or birth, nothing supernatural in his person or character, in his life or doctrine. He came to redeem the world, as does every great and good man, and deserved to be held in universal honor and esteem as one who remained firm to the truth amid every trial, and finally died on the cross, a martyr to his love of mankind. As a social reformer, as one devoted to the progress and well-being of man in this world, I thought I might liken myself to him and call myself by his name. I called myself a Christian, not because I took him for my master, not because I believed all he believed or taught, but because, like him, I was laboring to introduce a new order of things, and to promote the happiness of my kind. I used the Bible as a good Protestant, took what could be accommodated to my purpose, and pa.s.sed over the rest, as belonging to an age now happily outgrown. I followed the example of the carnal Jews, and gave an earthly sense to all the promises and prophecies of the Messias, and looked for my reward in this world."
The pa.s.sages we have italicized in this extract may go to show how far Dr. Brownson himself was, at this period, from being able to give any but the evasive answer he actually did give to the searching philosophical questions put by his youthful admirer. But it is not easy, especially in the light of Isaac Hecker"s subsequent experiences, to overestimate the influence which this new presentation of our Saviour had upon the development of his mind and character. For reasons which we have tried to indicate by a brief description of some of his life-long interior traits, the ordinary Protestant view, restricted and narrow, which represents Jesus Christ merely as the appointed though voluntary Victim of the Divine wrath against sin, had been pressed upon him prematurely. Now He was held up to him, and by a man who was in many ways superior to all other men the boy had met, as a great personality, altogether human, indeed, but still the most perfect specimen of the race; the supremely worshipful figure of all history, whose life had been given to the a.s.sertion of the dignity of man and the equality of mankind.
That human nature is good and that men are brethren, said Dr.
Brownson, was the thesis of Christ, taught throughout His life, sealed by His death. The Name which is above all names became thus in a new sense a watchword, and the Gospels a treasury for that social apostolate to which Isaac Hecker had already devoted himself with an earnestness which for some years made it seem religion enough for him.
So it has seemed before his time and since to many a benevolent dreamer. Though the rites of the humanitarian cult differ with its different priests, its creed retains everywhere and always its narrow ident.i.ty. But that all men are good, or would be so save for the unequal pressure of social conditions on them, is a conclusion which does not follow from the single premise that human nature, inasmuch as it is a nature and from the hand of G.o.d, is essentially good. The world is flooded, just at present, with schemes for insuring the perfection and happiness of men by removing so far as possible all restraints upon their natural freedom; and whether this is to be accomplished with Tolsto, by reducing wants to a minimum and abolishing money; or by establishing clubs for the promotion of culture and organizing a social army which shall destroy poverty by making money plenty, appears a mere matter of detail--at all events to dreamers and to novelists. But to men who are in hard earnest with themselves, men who "have not taken their souls in vain nor sworn deceitfully," either to their neighbor or about him, certain other truths concerning human nature besides that of its essential goodness are sure to make themselves evident, soon or late. And among these is that of its radical insufficiency to its own needs. It is a rational nature, and it seeks the Supreme Reason, if only for its own self-explication. It is a nature which, wherever found, is found in the att.i.tude of adoration, and neither in the individual man nor in humanity at large is there any Divinity which responds to worship.
It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker"s appreciation of this truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a tolerable approximation to the time. He went to Brook Farm in January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting with Dr. Brownson. It was by the advice of the latter that he made this first decisive break from his former life. From the time when their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social politics. We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with Kant"s _Critique of Pure Reason_ fastened up on the wall before him, so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor. Fichte and Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philosophers whose mother-tongue was likewise his own, and whose combined influence put him farther off than ever from the solution of that fundamental doubt which constantly grew more perplexing and more painful. We find him hiring a seat in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, where Orville Dewey was then preaching, and walking every Sunday a distance of three miles from the foot of Rutgers Street, "because he was a smart fellow, and I enjoyed listening to him. Did I believe in Unitarianism? _No! I believed in nothing."_
His active partic.i.p.ation in local politics did not continue throughout all these years. His belief in candidates and parties as instruments to be relied on for social purification received a final blow very early--possibly before he was ent.i.tled to cast a vote. The Workingmen had made a strong ticket one year, and there seemed every probability of their carrying it. But on the eve of the election half of their candidates sold out to one of the opposing parties. What other results this treachery may have had is a question which, fortunately, does not concern us, but it dispelled one of the strongest of Isaac Hecker"s youthful illusions. He continued, nevertheless, to prove the sincerity with which his views on social questions were held, by doing all that lay in his power to better the condition of the men in the employment of his brothers and himself.