As might have been anticipated, Bishop McCloskey’s advice was wise.  Plainly, his own hope was that young Hecker should enter the secular priesthood, but there is no evidence in the numerous references to the matter in the diary, that this caused him to do more than make his young friend fully acquainted with that state of life.  He had him call at the newly-opened diocesan seminary at Fordham and become acquainted with the professors.  Bishop Hughes, whom he also consulted, urged him to go to St. Sulpice in Paris, and to the Propaganda in Rome, and make his studies for the secular priesthood.  But they failed to win him to their opinion, and were too enlightened to seek to influence him except by argument.  Father Hecker ever held the very highest views on the dignity of the priesthood, considering its vocation second to none.  But while he was irresistibly inclined to a state of retirement quite incompatible with the duties of the secular priesthood in America, he also felt the most urgent need of constant advice and companionship for guidance in his interior life.  These seemingly contradictory requirements he hoped to find united in a religious community, and Bishop McCloskey emphatically assured him that his anticipations would not be disappointed.  In addition to this, Isaac Hecker had at least some premonitions of an apostolic vocation calling for a wider range of activity than can be usually compassed by the diocesan clergy.  But we have often heard him say that the immediate impulse which induced his application to be made a Redemptorist was need of “intimate and careful spiritual guidance.”

His director therefore became satisfied that he should become a religious, and turned his attention to the Society of Jesus, giving him the lives of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier to read, and, doubtless, answered his inquiries about that order.  “But,” he said in after years, “I had no vocation to teach young boys and felt unfitted for a student’s life”; added to this was the certainty of the postponement of any public activity on his part for many years if he became a Jesuit.

After mentioning that he had read the life of St. Francis Xavier, he says that an acquaintance had written him that a German priest, living in Third Street, wanted to see him.  This was one of the Redemptorist Fathers who were newly established in the city.  This priest, whose name is not given, undertook to assume direction of Isaac, and was very urgent with him to make a spiritual retreat with a view to deciding his vocation.  “He is a very zealous person—­too much so it seems to me,” is the comment in the diary, and the answer was a refusal.  But what he saw in the community pleased and attracted Isaac, for everything was poor and plain, and there was an air of solitude.  However, he would by no means change his spiritual adviser, writing, “I strive to follow my spiritual director or else I should be fearful of my state.  All my difficulties, sins, and temptations I make him acquainted with. . . .  Though the world has no particular hold upon me, I give it up once and for all.  It gives me pain to feel my perfect want of faith in myself as being in any way useful.”