If he had received a Catholic training, Isaac Hecker would soon have recognized that he was being drawn toward the practice of that counsel of perfection which St. Paul embodies to St. Timothy in the words:  “Having food and wherewith to be covered, with these we are content."* Could he have sought at this time the advice of one familiar with internal ways, he must have been cautioned against that first error to which those so drawn are liable, of supposing that this call is common and imperative, and can never fail to be heard without some more or less wilful closing of the ears.  Though the Hecker brothers were, and ever continued to be, men of the highest business integrity, and though there existed between them a cordial affection, which was intensified to an extraordinary degree in the case of George and Isaac, yet the unfitness of the latter for ordinary trade grew increasingly evident, and to himself painfully so.  The truth is, that his ideas of conducting business would have led to the distribution of profits rather than to their accumulation.  If he could make the bake-house and the shop into a school for the attainment of an ideal that had begun to hover, half-veiled, in the air above him, he saw his way to staying where he was; but not otherwise.

[* I Timothy 6:8.]

In the autumn of 1842 there came upon him certain singular intensifications of this disquiet with himself and his surroundings.  In the journal begun the following spring, he so frequently and so explicitly refers to these occurrences, now speaking of them as “dreams which had a great effect upon my character”; and again, specializing and fully describing one, as something not dreamed, but seen when awake, “which left an indelible impression my mind,” weaning it at once and for ever from all possibility of natural love and marriage, that the integrity of any narrative of his life would demand some recognition of them.  His own comment, in the diary, will not be without interest and value, both as bearing on much that follows, and as containing all that need be said in explanation of the present reference to such experiences: 

“April 24, 1843.—. . .  How can I doubt these things?  Say what may be said, still they have to me a reality, a practical good bearing on my life.  They are impressive instructors, whose teachings are given in such a real manner that they influence me whether I would or not.  Real pictures of the future, as actual, nay, more so than my present activity.  If I should not follow them I am altogether to blame.  I can have no such adviser upon earth; none could impress me so strongly, with such peculiar effect, and at the precise time most needed.  Where my natural strength is not enough, I find there comes foreign aid to my assistance.  Is the Lord instructing me for anything?  I had, six months ago, three or more dreams which had a very great effect upon my character; they changed it.  They were the embodiment of my present in a great degree.  Last evening’s was a warning embodiment of a false activity and its consequence, which will preserve me, under God’s assistance, from falling. . . .  I see by it where I am; it has made me purer.”