that he could not quite accept it for himself.  Such counsel was no better than motioning him away from it, and was but a symbol of Brownson’s own devious progress, swaying now to one side and again to the other, but always going forward to Rome.  But young Hecker would learn for himself.  Of an abnormally inquiring mind by nature, he never accepted a witness other than himself about any matter if he could help it.

In the early part of 1844 the question of religious affiliation began to press for settlement with increasing urgency, casting him at times into an agony of mind.  It was not merely that he was impelled by conscience towards the fulness of truth, but that truth in its simplest elements seemed sometimes to be lacking to him.  He was heard to say in after years that, had he not found Catholicity true, he would have been thrown back into a scepticism so painful as to suggest suicide as a relief.  Yet those who have trodden any of the paths which lead from inherited heresy to true doctrine, will appreciate the force of the influences, both personal and social, which induced him to reconsider, and make for himself the grand rounds of Protestant orthodoxy before turning his back upon it for ever.

We find him, therefore, going diligently to all who claimed to be watchmen on the walls of Sion, to seek from each one personally that countersign which would tally with the divine word nature and grace were uttering in his own soul.  He interviewed ministers repeatedly.  “Not having had,” he wrote in this magazine for November, 1887, “personal and experimental knowledge of the Protestant denominations, I investigated them all, going from one of them to another—­Episcopal, Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and all—­conferring with their ministers and reading their books.  It was a dreary business, but I did it.  I knew Transcendentalism well and had been a radical socialist.  All was found to be as stated above.  Brownson’s ripe experience and my own thoroughly earnest investigation tallied perfectly.  Indeed, the more you examine the Protestant sects in the light of first principles the more they are found to weaken human certitude, interfere with reason’s native knowledge of God and His attributes, and perplex the free working of the laws of human thought.  Protestantism is no religion for a philosopher, unless he is a pessimist—­if you can call such a being a philosopher—­and adopts Calvinism.”

Why Calvinism, with its dread consistency of aversion for human nature, did not attract him in these early inquiries was expressed by Father Hecker in after years by the saying, “Heresy always involves a mutilation of man’s natural reason.”  The typical Calvinist foams against man’s natural capacity for the true and the good, and one of its representatives, a Presbyterian minister, had the consistency to say to our young disciple of nature, “Unless you believe that you are totally depraved you will certainly suffer eternal damnation.”  These words were spoken to one who felt some sort of apostleship growing into act within his bosom:  to preach the Gospel to those who are totally depraved he perceived to be both vain and suicidal.  Furthermore, the consciousness of his own upright character, his experience and observation of human virtue in others, made abstract arguments needless to prove that Calvinism is an outrage on human kind and a blasphemy against the Creator.