These words are significant testimony to the nobility of the impression made on others by Father Hecker’s personality in early manhood.  Even if our only addition to such scanty knowledge of his life at Brook Farm as could be gathered from his own conversations in later years were this happily-touched sketch, it could hardly be more interesting than it is.  But, fortunately, it does not stand alone.  Its fine recognition of the lofty purity of his nature is everywhere borne out by the unpremeditated and candid self-revelations of the diary.  Their characteristic trait is everywhere aspiration—­a sense of joy in elevation above the earthly, or a sense of depression because the earthly weighs him down.  Then come eager glances of inquiry in every direction for the satisfaction of his aspirations, little by little narrowing down to the Catholic Church, wherein the dove of Mr. Curtis’s image was finally to rest his foot for ever.  And in all this he scarcely at all mentions a dread of the Divine wrath as a motive for his flight.  It is not out of the city of destruction, but toward the celestial city that he goes.  He is drawn by what he wants, not hounded by what he fears.  Always there is the reaching out of a strong nature toward what it lacks—­a material for its strength to work on, a craving for rational joy, coupled with an ever-increasing conviction that nature cannot give him such a boon.  Men who knew Father Hecker only in his royal maturity, sometimes cavilled at his words of emphatic faith in guileless nature; but they had only to know him a little better to learn his appreciation of the supernatural order, and his recognition of its absolute and exclusive competency to satisfy nature’s highest aspirations.  Reading these early journals, we have constantly recalled the later days when he so often, and sometimes continually, repeated, “Religion is a boon!” No one could know that better than he who had so deeply felt the want it satisfies.

The diary was begun in the middle of April, 1843, when Isaac had just returned to Brook Farm after a fortnight spent at home.  It opens with a prayer for light and direction, which is its dedication to the uses not only of an earnest but a religious seeker.  He addresses himself directly to God as Father, not making either appeal or reference to our Lord.  But there is in it an invocation to those “that are in heaven to intercede and plead” for him, which recalls the fact, so often mentioned by him, that it was the teaching of the Catechism of the Council of Trent on the Communion of Saints which cleared away his final clouds and brought him directly to the Church.  There is a note, too, among his later papers, in which, speaking of the phenomena of modern spiritualism, he says that the same longing for an assurance of personal immortality which leads so many into that maze of mingled truth and error, had a great share in disposing his mind to accept the authoritative doctrine of the Church, which here as elsewhere answered fully the deepest longings of his soul.