Now, upon this state of mind the teaching of Dr. Brownson came like seed upon a fallow soil.  Like that which preceded it, it erred rather by defect than by actual or, at any rate, by wilful deviation from true doctrine.  Isaac Hecker met for the first time in Orestes Brownson an exponent of Jesus Christ as the great Benefactor and Uplifter of the human race in this present life.  Dr. Brownson has himself given a statement of the views which he held and inculcated between 1834 and 1843—­which includes the period we are at present considering—­and it is so brief and to the point that we cannot do better than to quote it: 

“I found in me,” he writes (The Convert,p. 111), “certain religious sentiments that I could not efface; certain religious beliefs or tendencies, of which I could not divest myself.  I regarded them as a law of my nature, as natural to man, as the noblest part of our nature, and as such I cherished them; but as the expression in me of an objective world, I seldom pondered them. I found them universal, manifesting themselves, in some form, wherever man is found; but I received them, or supposed I received them, on the authority of humanity or human nature, and professed to hold no religion except that of humanity.  I had become a believer in humanity, and put humanity in the place of God.  The only God I recognized was the divine in man, the divinity of humanity, one alike with God and with man, which I supposed to be the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the mystery of Emmanuel, or God with us—­God manifest in the flesh.  There may be an unmanifested God, and certainly is; but the only God who exists for us is the God in man, the active and living principle of human nature.

“I regarded Jesus Christ as divine in the sense in which all men are divine, and human in the sense in which all men are human.  I took him as my model man, and regarded him as a moral and social reformer, who sought, by teaching the truth under a religious envelope, and practising the highest and purest morality, to meliorate the earthly condition of mankind; but I saw nothing miraculous in his conception or birth, nothing supernatural in his person or character, in his life or doctrine.  He came to redeem the world, as does every great and good man, and deserved to be held in universal honor and esteem as one who remained firm to the truth amid every trial, and finally died on the cross, a martyr to his love of mankind.  As a social reformer, as one devoted to the progress and well-being of man in this world, I thought I might liken myself to him and call myself by his name.  I called myself a Christian, not because I took him for my master, not because I believed all he believed or taught, but because, like him, I was laboring to introduce a new order of things, and to promote the happiness of my kind.  I used the Bible as a good Protestant, took what could be accommodated to my purpose, and passed over the rest, as belonging to an age now happily outgrown.  I followed the example of the carnal Jews, and gave an earthly sense to all the promises and prophecies of the Messias, and looked for my reward in this world.”