as it is to Christian philosophy.  To this fact, so important in certain of its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on.  They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda, jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last years of his life, by one whom he admitted to an unusually close intimacy.  He was always singularly reserved concerning matters purely personal; his confidences, when they touched his own soul, seldom seemed entirely voluntary, and were quickly checked.  Occasionally they were taken by surprise, as when the course of talk insensibly turned toward internal ways; and again they were deliberately angled for with a hook so well concealed that it secured a prize before he was aware.  From these notes we shall here make a few quotations bearing on the point made above—­i.e., that his difficulties prior to his entrance into the church were neither moral nor spiritual, but intellectual.  Of him, if of any man, it was always true that his heart was naturally Christian.  The first of these extracts, bearing as it does on a topic constantly in his thoughts, affords a good enough example of what was meant in saying that his confidences were sometimes taken by surprise: 

“There are some for whom the predominant influence is the external one, authority, example, precept, and the like.  Others in whose lives the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates.  In my case, from my childhood God influenced me by an interior light and by the interior touch of His Holy Spirit.”

At another time he said: 

“While I was a youth, and in early manhood, I was preserved from certain sins and certain occasions of sin, in a way that was peculiar and remarkable.  I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the time, conscious that God was preserving me innocent with a view to some future providence.  Mind, all this was long before I came into the church.”

And again: 

“Many a time before my conversion God gave me grace to weep over those words:  ‘And all those who love His coming.’  I did not believe in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to believe it.  I had learned much of the Bible from my mother and had read it often and much myself.”

This consciously supernatural character of his inner life from the first, should be kept closely united in the reader’s mind with that other idea of his adhesion to “guileless nature” which was such a favorite theme with Father Hecker.  No one could be more emphatic than he in asserting the necessity of the supernatural for the attainment of man’s destiny.  How could it be otherwise, when he considered that destiny to be the elevation of man above all good merely human, and by means far beyond the compass of his natural powers?  Still, this was undoubtedly a conclusion of his riper years, a result arrived at after a certain intense if not very prolonged experience in contemporary Utopias, in futile endeavors to raise man above his own level while remaining on it, whether by socialistic schemes or social politics.