The diary, which runs side by side with these letters, was, as usual, the recipient of more intimate self-communings than could be shared with any friend.  It shows that although he was now well-nigh convinced of the truth of Catholicity, yet that he still felt a lingering indecision, produced, perhaps, by a haunting memory of the stern front of “discipline” he had encountered in Bishop Hughes.  This seemed like a phantom of terror to the young social reformer, whose love of liberty, though rational, was then and ever afterwards one of the passions of his soul.  Yet we rarely find now in these pages any statement of specific reasons for and against Catholicity such as were plentiful during the period preceding his acquaintance with Mr. Haight, Dr. Seabury, and Mr. Norris.  He seems to shudder as he stands on the bank and looks upon the flowing and cleansing stream; but his hesitancy is caused not so much by any unanswered difficulties of his reason as by his sensibilities, by vague feelings of alarm for the integrity of his manhood.  He feared lest the waters might cleanse him by skinning him alive.  Catholicity, as typified in Bishop Hughes, her Celtic-American champion, seemed to him “a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass against the whole land.”

Now, Isaac Hecker was built for a missionary, and the extreme view of the primary value of highly-wrought discipline which he encountered everywhere among Catholics, though not enough to blind him to the essential liberty of the Church, was enough to delay him in his progress to her.  There can be little doubt that multitudes of men and women of less discernment and feebler will than his, have been and still are kept entirely out of the Church by the same cause.

Only at long intervals, as we near the last pages of the large and closely-written book containing the first volume of his diary, do we meet with those agonizing complaints of dryness, the distress of doubt, the weary burden of insoluble difficulties, so common heretofore.  He seems, indeed, no longer battling; be victory is won; but it remains to know what are the spoils and where they are to be gathered.  Of course there are interludes of his irrepressible philosophizing on moral questions.  And at the very end, under date of May 23, 1844, we find the following: 

“This afternoon brings me to the close of this book.  How different are the emotions with which I close it from those with which I opened it at Brook Farm, now little more (a month) than a year ago!  How fruitful has this year been to me!  How strangely mysterious and beautiful!  And now my soul foreshadows more the next year than ever it presaged before.  My life is beyond my grasp, and bears me on will-lessly to its destined haven.  Like a rich fountain it overflows on every side; from within flows unceasingly the noiseless tide.  The many changes and unlooked-for results and circumstances, within and without, of the coming year I would no more venture to anticipate