or child a Christian?  Evidently not.  And why?  For that is a personal work, and the personal work of Christ; for Christ alone can make men Christians.  And no account of Christ is Christ. . .  The contents of a book, whatever these may be, are powerless to place its readers in direct contact and vital relations with its author.  No man is so visionary as to imagine that the mental operation of reading the Iliad, or the Phaedo, or the Divine Comedy, suffices to put him in communication with the personality of Homer, or Plato, or Dante.  All effort is in vain to slake the thirst of a soul famishing for the Fountain of living waters from a brook, or to stop the cravings of a soul for the living Saviour with a printed book. . . .  His words are ’Come unto ME all that are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you.’  It was the attempt to make men Christians by reading the Bible that broke Christendom into fragments, multiplied jarring Christian sects, produced swarms of doubters, filled the world with sceptics and scoffers at all religion, frustrated combined Christian action, and put back the Christian conquest of the world for centuries.  Three centuries of experience have made it evident enough that, if Christianity is to be maintained as a principle of life among men, it must be on another footing than the suicidal hypothesis invented in the sixteenth century after the birth of its divine Founder.”

His farewell interviews with exponents of the Protestant claims were mainly, if not wholly, with representatives of Anglicanism.  This did not arise from any grounded hope of getting all he wanted there, but from an insensible drift of his mind upon those currents of thought set in motion by the great power of Newman.  The air was full of promise of non-Roman Catholicity, and the voices which called the English-speaking world to listen were the most eloquent since Shakespeare.  It needed but a dim hope pointing along any road to induce the delicate conscience of Isaac Hecker to try if it might not be a thoroughfare.  But neither in his copious entries in the diary at this period, nor in his articles in this magazine for the year 1887 on Dr. Brownson’s difficulties—­and these were much like his own—­do we find any trace of his discovering in Anglicanism a germ of Catholicity unfolding from the chrysalis of genuine Protestantism and casting it off.  This was readily perceived in Isaac Hecker’s bearing and conversation by acute Episcopalians themselves, as in the case of Dr. Seabury, who, as Father Hecker relates in the articles above referred to, prophesied Brownson’s conversion to Catholicity, and did so for reasons which Seabury must have known would apply to young Hecker also.