The Questions of the Soul was well named, for it undertakes to show how the cravings of man for divine union may be satisfied.  It does this by discussing the problem of human destiny, affirming the need of God for the soul’s light and for its virtue, proving this by arguments drawn from the instincts, faculties, and achievements of man.  The sense of want in man is the universal argument for his need of more than human fruition, and in the moral order is the irrefragable proof of both his own dignity and his incapacity to make himself worthy of it.  Father Hecker urged in this book that man is born to be more than equal to himself—­an evident proof of the need of a superhuman or supernatural religion.  Eleven chapters, making one-third of the volume, are devoted to showing this, and include the author’s own itinerarium from his first consciousness of the supreme question of the soul until its final answer in the Catholic Church, embracing short accounts of the Brook Farm and Fruitlands communities, and mention of other such abortive attempts at solution.  Three chapters then affirm and briefly develop the claim of Christ to be the entire fulfilment of the soul’s need for God, with the Catholic Church as his chosen means and instrument.  These are entitled respectively, “The Model Man,” “The Model Life,” and “The Idea of the Church.”  Three more chapters discuss Protestantism, stating its commonest doctrines and citing its most competent witnesses in proof of its total and often admitted inadequacy to lead man to his destiny.  Bringing the reader back to the Church, the fourteen last chapters fully develop her claims, dealing mostly with known facts and public institutions, and citing largely the testimony of non-Catholic writers.

It is something like the inductive method to infer the existence of a God from that of an admitted appetite, as also to learn the kind of food from the nature of the organs provided by nature for its reception and digestion.  So the longings of man’s moral nature, Father Hecker felt, when fairly understood, must lead to the knowledge of what he wants for their satisfaction—­the Infinite Good—­and that by a process of reasoning something equivalent to the scientific.  Such is the statement of his case, embracing with its argument the introductory chapters.  The inquiry then extends to the claimants in the religious world, not simply as to which is biblically authentic or historically so, but rather as to which religion claims to satisfy the entire human want of God and makes the claim good as an actual fact.  It is wonderful how this line of argument simplifies controversy, and no less wonderful to find how easily the victory is won by the Catholic claim.  The reader will also notice how consistent all this is with Father Hecker’s own experience from the beginning.