YEARNINGS AFTER CONTEMPLATION

“COULD I but give up all my time to contemplation, study, reading, and reflection!”

Upon this aspiration as a background the whole matter of Isaac Hecker’s vocation must be considered.  In substance we have met with it very frequently already; in the shape just given it confronts us on the first page of the new diary begun a few days before his baptism.  And as our reader accompanies us through the records he made during the year that still elapsed before he entered the Redemptorist Order, nothing, we think, will become more evident than that he was called to something beyond adhesion to the Church, the worthy reception of the sacraments, or even the ordinary sacerdotal state.

To make this still plainer at the start, it may be useful to describe briefly the special grounds whereon Isaac Hecker fought his life-long battles.  These were, first:  The validity of those natural aspirations which are called religious, and which embrace the veracity of reason in its essential affirmations.  Second:  Whether man be by nature guileless or totally depraved:  Third, Whether religion be or be not intrinsically and primarily an elevating influence whose end is to raise men to real union with God.

To many inquirers after the true religion such preliminary doubts have been already settled, either by natural bent of mind or docility to previous training; and they pass on to consider apostolical succession, the primacy of Peter, the nature and number of the sacraments, and other matters wherein heresy errs by denial or by defect.  But to Isaac Hecker all such points as these were, in a sense, subsidiary.  He had asked admission into the Church because he found it to be the only teaching society on earth whose doctrines gave complete and adequate satisfaction to that fundamental craving of his nature which prompted his questions.  She accredited herself to him as fully by that fact as she must have done to many a philosophic pagan among those who were the first disciples to the new faith preached by St. John or St. Paul.  All else he accepted with an implicit, child-like confidence not different from that which moves the loyal descendant of ages of Catholic ancestors.  It was clear to him that these accompanying doctrines and institutions must have been enfolded within the original germ, and must be received on the same authority, not by an analytic process and on their merits, one by one.

What he wanted was, in the first place, sustenance for what he invariably calls “the life” given him; and next, light to see in what way he was to put to use the strength so gained.  The first effect of the sacraments was what one might call the natural one of making more visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating his instinctive efforts to pierce through them.  After the rapturous joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation and dryness heavier than he had ever known at once set in.  Perhaps he had expected the very reverse of this.  At all events, it was not many days before it drew from him the complaint that in leaving Concord he had also left behind him the great interior sweetness which had buoyed him up.  On August 11 he writes: