It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker’s appreciation of this truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a tolerable approximation to the time.  He went to Brook Farm in January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting with Dr. Brownson.  It was by the advice of the latter that he made this first decisive break from his former life.  From the time when their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social politics.  We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason fastened up on the wall before him, so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor.  Fichte and Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philosophers whose mother-tongue was likewise his own, and whose combined influence put him farther off than ever from the solution of that fundamental doubt which constantly grew more perplexing and more painful.  We find him hiring a seat in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, where Orville Dewey was then preaching, and walking every Sunday a distance of three miles from the foot of Rutgers Street, “because he was a smart fellow, and I enjoyed listening to him.  Did I believe in Unitarianism? No!  I believed in nothing."

His active participation in local politics did not continue throughout all these years.  His belief in candidates and parties as instruments to be relied on for social purification received a final blow very early—­possibly before he was entitled to cast a vote.  The Workingmen had made a strong ticket one year, and there seemed every probability of their carrying it.  But on the eve of the election half of their candidates sold out to one of the opposing parties.  What other results this treachery may have had is a question which, fortunately, does not concern us, but it dispelled one of the strongest of Isaac Hecker’s youthful illusions.  He continued, nevertheless, to prove the sincerity with which his views on social questions were held, by doing all that lay in his power to better the condition of the men in the employment of his brothers and himself.  After he passed his majority his interest in the business declined rapidly, and it is impossible to doubt that one of the chief reasons why it did so is to be sought in his changing convictions as to the manner in which business in general should be carried on.

Although in accepting Christ as his master and model he had as yet no belief in Him as more than the most perfect of human beings, yet, even so, Isaac Hecker’s sincerity and simplicity were too great to permit him to follow his leader at a purely conventional distance.  “Do you know,” he said long afterwards, “the thought that first loosened me from the life I led?  How can I love my fellow-men and yet get rich by the sweat of their brows?  I couldn’t do it.  You are not a Christian, and can’t call yourself one, I said to myself, if you do that.  The heathenish selfishness of business competition started me away from the world.”