But these were early days, days when the influence of his mother, never wholly shaken off, was still dominant and pervasive in all that concerned him.  There came a period, however, beginning in all likelihood about his fourteenth, and lasting until his twentieth year or thereabouts, in which he certainly lost hold on all distinctively Christian doctrines.  With such a mind as his, and such a training, this was almost inevitable.  His intellect, while it hungered incessantly after supernatural truth, kept nevertheless a persistent hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until it had synthetized them into a coherent whole.  That was his life-long characteristic.  During the years of painful ill health which preceded his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to the supernatural as if by instinct.  “But I am a Saxon and cling to the earthy” he would say; “I want an explicit and satisfactory reason why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed.”  He attributed this to his racial peculiarities.  Others may differ with him and credit it to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity.  Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised.  He could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to command.  He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary master.

Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of orthodox Protestantism, was certain to reject it sooner or later, impelled by hunger for the whole Divine gift of which that teaching contains fragments only.  The soul of Isaac Hecker was one athirst for God from the first dawn of its conscious being.  Upon Him, its Creator and Source, it never lost hold, and never ceased to cry out for Him with longing and aspiration, even during that bitter and protracted period of his youth when his mind, entangled in the maze of philosophic subjectivism, seemed in danger of rejecting theism altogether.  But the underpinning of his faith, so far as that professed to be Christian and to come by hearing—­to have an intellectual basis, that is—­began to slip away almost as soon as he left his mother’s knee.  It is possible that very little stress was ever laid upon distinctively Christian doctrines in her teaching.  To adore God the Creator, to listen to His voice in conscience, to live honestly and purely as in His sight—­the heritage she transmitted to him probably contained little more than this.  Like most others reared in heresy who afterwards attain to the true knowledge of the Incarnation, he had to seek for it with almost as great travail of mind as if he had been born a pagan.  It cannot be too strongly insisted on, however, that his struggles were merely intellectual, and, when they began to take a definite turn, shaped themselves into the natural result of a metaphysic as repugnant to common sense