The literary faults of the book are not a few; for if the argument is compact, its details seem to have been hastily snatched up and put together, or perhaps the occupations of the missions prevented revision and consultation.  There is a large surplusage of quotations from poets, many of them obscure, and worthy of praise rather as didactic writers than as poets; yet every word quoted bears on the point under discussion.  To one who has labored in preparing sermons, each chapter looks like the cullings of the preacher’s commonplace book set in order for memorizing; and very many sentences are rhetorically faulty.  But, in spite of all these defects, the book is a powerful one, and nothing is found to hurt clearness or strength of expression.  What we have criticised are only bits of bark left clinging to the close-jointed but rough-hewn frame-work.

The Questions of the Soul was got out by the Appletons, and was at the time of its publication a great success, and still remains so.  The reason is because the author takes nothing for granted, propounds difficulties common to all non-Catholics, sceptics as well as professing Protestants, and offers solutions verifiable by inspection of every-day Catholicity and by evidences right at hand.  Catholicity is the true religion, because it alone unites men to God in the fulness of union, supernatural and integral in inner and outer life—­a union demanded by the most resistless cravings of human nature:  such is the thesis.  There can be little doubt that prior to this book there was nothing like its argument current in English literature; a short and extremely instructive account by Frederick Lucas of his conversion from Quakerism is the only exception known to us, and that but partially resembles it, is quite brief, and has long since gone out of print.

The Aspirations of Nature deals with intellectual difficulties in the same manner as the Questions of the Soul does with the moral ones.  The greatest possible emphasis is laid upon the two-fold truth that man’s intellectual nature is infallible in its rightful domain, and that that domain is too narrow for its own activity.  The validity of human reason as far as it goes, and its failure to go far enough for man’s intellectual needs, are the two theses of the book.  They are well and thoroughly proved; and no one can deny the urgent need of discussing them:  the dignity of human nature and the necessity of revelation.  Like Father Hecker’s first book, the Aspirations of Nature is good for all non-Catholics, because in proving the dignity of man’s reason Protestants are brought face to face with their fundamental error of total depravity; enough for their case surely.  If they take refuge in the mitigations of modern Protestant beliefs, they nearly always go to the extreme of asserting the entire sufficiency of the human intellect, and are here met by the argument for the necessity of revelation.