worthy of the description of St. Paul when he calls it “the witness of the Spirit.”  Now, as a witness who cannot be brought into open court to give his testimony might as well be dumb, and is as good as no witness, so the inner life, lacking the true external order of God, is cramped and helpless; and cramped and helpless Isaac Hecker was.  Whatever he did, therefore, toward investigating religious evidences was done primarily as a search for the external criterion which should guarantee the validity of the inspirations of God within him, and at the same time provide a medium of union with his fellow-men.

Those whose advertence is not particularly aroused to the facts of their interior life, have for their main task either the study of the Church as a visible society, claiming continuity with one established by Christ; or, preceding that, the question whether such a society was ever founded by God.  Now, although such questions must be settled by all, they are not the main task of men like Isaac Hecker.  In their case the problem transcending all others is where to find that divine external order demanded for the completion of their inner experience.  Such men must say:  If there is no external order of God in this world, then my whole interior life is fatally awry.

The captain whose voyage is on the track of the trade winds nevertheless needs more than dead reckoning for his course; he needs to take the sun at noon, to study the heavens at night, and to con his chart.  To follow one’s interior drift only is to sail the ocean without chart or compass.  The sail that is wafted by the impulses of the divine Spirit in the interior life must have, besides, the guarantee of divine veracity in the external order to justify him.  This he needs, in order to safeguard him in the interior life itself, and to provide a common court of appeal between himself and his fellows, or otherwise he is in danger of fanaticism, and is certain of the mistrust of his fellow-men.  No man, unsupported by external miracles, can claim to teach what is vouched for only by his own testimony; and this especially applies to purely subjective experiences.  Isaac Hecker was a born teacher of men, and to be shut off from them by an isolated experience was to be robbed of his vocation.  A soul like his, led to the truth along the path of social reform, will hail with delight a religion which organizes all humanity on a basis of equality, and at the same time verifies and explains the facts of each one’s particular experience.  Such a religion is to be longed for, not only because of its universal brotherhood, but also because it can decide between the inspirations of the Holy Spirit and the criminal conceits of passion or the dreams of an imaginative temperament.

Many years afterwards Father Hecker thus stated the harmony between the inner and outer action of God in the soul’s life: