Many at this time were being drawn by poetical sentiment to the beautiful and religious forms of Episcopalian worship; drawn and held rather by imagination and feeling than by any adhesion of their minds to distinctive Anglican doctrines.  Father Hecker was, indeed, more poetical in temperament than at first acquaintance he seemed to be, but his mind was so constituted that he must have the main reasons of things, whether religious or not, firmly settled before he could enjoy their use.  Nor could he be content with fragments of revealed truth, such as are found in all denominations of non-Catholics.  “There is a large floating body of Catholic truth in the world,” says Newman; “it comes down by tradition from age to age. . . .  Men [outside the church] take up and profess these scattered truths, merely because they fall in with them.”  Not so Father Hecker:  no flotsam and jetsam of doctrine for him, unless some fragment would reveal to him the name of the ship from which it had been torn, and the port from which she had sailed, and so lead him to the discovery of the ship herself, crew, cargo, port, and owner.

Yet he lingered long over the claim of Anglicanism to be the Catholic religion.  Of Mr. Haight and of his interviews with him we have already spoken.  Through him he came across a published letter of a Mr. Norris, Episcopal minister in Carlisle, Pa., which so pleased him for its Catholic tendency that he wrote to him, asking to be allowed to go to Carlisle and live there as the writer’s pupil.  The answer, though a refusal of this request, was kind, and contained a cordial invitation to visit Mr. Norris after Easter.  On his way to Concord, in the following spring, Isaac made a long detour to the little town in southern Pennsylvania, interviewed Mr. Norris, and came away no wiser than before.

The following words of the diary, under date of March 30, 1844, refer to an Episcopal dignitary of higher grade: 

“Mr. Haight gave me a note of introduction to Dr. Seabury.  I called to see him two evenings ago and had a very pleasant conversation with him.  His sociableness and perfect openness of expression I was quite delighted with.  He frankly acknowledged that he thought that error had been committed on both sides in the controversy of the Reformation between the Pope and the Anglican Church.  He recommended me to examine those points which kept me from joining the Anglican or Roman Church before I should do anything further, as there was the charge of schism against the Anglican Church and neglect of discipline among the members of her communion.  I told him that though the Church of Rome may commit errors in practice, she had not committed any in principle, and that it was easier to prune a luxuriant tree than to revivify a tree almost exhausted of life.  I left him with an earnest invitation to call again.”