To us this is exceedingly instructive, for it tells us how not to meet the earnest seeker after Catholic truth.  Even a good-natured dog does not show his teeth when caressed, nor is an artillery salute the only show of amity between even warlike powers.  Yet the repellant attitude of the great controversialist was that of very many representative Catholics of his time, especially those holding his high office.  For although he really did know the American people, and although their country was fully his own, and was by him deeply and intelligently loved, yet he did not understand or sympathize with the religious movements of which his strange young visitor was the truest type.  He afterwards knew him better and loved him.

The toss thus given Isaac Hecker by Bishop Hughes’s catapult of “discipline” had the good effect of throwing him again upon a full and perfect and final investigation of Protestantism.  With what immediate result is shown by the Seabury interview already related, and with what honesty of purpose is shown by the following words written the same day: 

“If a low passion usurps the place of pure love, if a blind prejudice usurps the place of Catholic truth, he who informs me of it, though he had been my enemy (if enemies it is possible for me to have), I will receive him as an angel from heaven, as an instrument of God.  My honor, my consistency, my character consists in faithfulness to God’s love, God’s truth, and nothing else.  Let me be but true to Him—­how then can I be false to either man or the world?  It is Him who knows our secret thoughts that we should fear (if fear we must) and obey.”

Thus it was Anglicanism that engaged Isaac Hecker’s last efforts to adjust a Protestant outside to his inward experience with the Holy Spirit; and this for a reason quite evident.  That body pretended, then as now, to be the Catholic Christian Church, assisting men to union with God by a divinely-founded external organism, but not demanding the sacrifice of human liberty.  To an inexperienced observer such as he, it seemed possible that Anglicanism might be the union of historical Christianity with manly freedom.  Closer observation proved to him not only the compatibility of Catholicity and liberty, but that Anglicanism, though assuming some of the forms of Catholic unity, is kept alive by the principle of individual separatism common to all Protestant sects.  For a time, or in a place, it may have much or little of Catholicity; but in no place can it live for a day without the Protestant principle of a right of final appeal to the individual judgment to decide upon the verity of doctrine.

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CHAPTER XIV

HIS LIFE AT CONCORD

“I HAVE been groping in darkness, seeking where Thou wast not, and I found Thee not.  But, O Lord my God, Thou hast found me—­leave me not.”