Meantime, on Trinity Sunday, he had been confirmed with his brother George, whose entrance into the Church is here first indicated; no other member of the family became a Catholic.  Isaac took the additional name of Thomas on receiving this sacrament, in honor of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Again he writes: 

“I have tried to study to-day, but I cannot.  Is it not the business of man to save his own soul, and this before all things?  Does the study of Greek and Latin help a soul towards its salvation?  Is it not quite a different thing from grace?  Sometimes I feel strongly inclined to set aside all study, all reading, as superficial and not so important as contemplation and silence.”

The time was coming when the Holy Spirit would do this in spite of him and in a way the reverse of pleasant.  Meantime he worked away at his books and attended his classes at Cornelius Institute, which was the name of the private school he had been attending, till July 16, the commencement day.  In recording his impressions of the school and the acquaintances there made, he says that with one possible exception the young men were of little interest to him, lacking earnestness of character.  He does not name the teachers or give the location of the school.  Yet he says his experience there had been useful “and chastened my hopes.  I have seen by means of it much more clearly into the workings of Protestantism, its want of deep spirituality, its superficiality, and its inevitable tendency to no-religion.”

As may be supposed, his visits to Third Street became frequent, and his acquaintance with the Fathers better established.  This was especially true with regard to Father Rumpler, who was rector of the house, a learned and able man and one of mature spirituality.  He was a German born and bred, with the hard ideas of discipline peculiar to a class of his countrymen though foreign to the genuine German character.  He impressed young Hecker as a sedate man, wise and firm.  The friendship then begun was maintained until Father Rumpler was deprived of his reason by an attack of acute mania several years later.  But more than the friendship of Rumpler, as far as immediate results were concerned, was the providential circumstance of two other young Americans having applied to join the Redemptorists.  To Isaac this was a stimulant of no ordinary power.  Like himself, they were converts and very fervent ones; but, unlike him, they had come into the Church from Episcopalianism.  Clarence A. Walworth, son of the Chancellor of the State of New York, was a graduate of Union College.  He studied law in Albany and practised his profession for a short time, but finally undertook the ministry.  After three years in the Episcopal seminary he became a Catholic.  Those who know him now can see the tall and graceful youth, pleasing and kindly, with the face and voice and soul of an orator; for the force and charm of youth have not been weakened in receiving the dignity of old age.