No small part of Isaac’s distress arose from what the diary calls the ugliness, vulgarity, and discord everywhere to be met with in his daily round of duties.  He had one refuge from this in his domestic life—­a pleasant, pure, and peaceful home; and another in the inner chamber of his soul, better fitted every day to be a sanctuary to which he could fly for solace.  But his heart fairly bled for the vast mass of men and of women about him, only a few of whom had such an outer refuge, and perhaps fewer still the inner one.  This sympathy he felt his life long.  He ever blamed the huge accretion of law and customs and selfishness which is called society for much of this misery of men, this hindrance to a fair distribution of the goods of this world, this guilty permission on the part of the fortunate few of the want and dirt and ugliness and coarseness which are the lot of almost the whole race of man.  Yet he was not blind to individual guilt.  Right here in his diary, after lamenting his enforced inability to succor human misery, he says that some words dropped by the workmen in conversation with him cause him to record his conviction that suffering and injustice, together with the deprivation of liberty, are due to one’s own fault as well as to that of others: 

“Every evil that society inflicts upon me, the germ of it is my own fault; in proportion as I free myself from my vices will I free myself from the evils which society inflicts upon me.  Be true to thyself and thou canst not be false to any one.  Be true to thyself and it follows as night follows day that others cannot be false to thee.”

Of course this panacea offers only an inward healing, for none more readily admitted than he who wrote these sentences that in externals the true heart is often the first victim of the malice of the false heart.

Ever and again we find in the diary reflections on the general aspect of religion.  The Protestant churches seemed to him to fail to meet the aspirations of the natural man; that is the burden of his complaint against them all.  Some, like the Unitarians, did but offer man his best self and hence added nothing to humanity, while humanity at its best ceaselessly condemned itself as insufficient.  This insufficiency of man for himself, Calvinistic and Lutheran Protestantism in their turn condemned as a depravity worthy of the deepest hell, making man a wretch maimed in his very nature so cruelly and fatally as to be damned for what he could not help being guilty of.  Meantime the Catholic Church was seen by Isaac Hecker as having elements the most attractive.  It recognized in man his native dignity; it saw in him a being made God-like by the attribute of reason, and called him to a state infinitely more God-like by a supernatural union with Christ.  It understood his weakness, pitied it, and knew how to cure it.  True, there are passages here in which his impatience with the public attitude of the Church betrays that his view