It takes an intimate knowledge of Catholicity to perceive the interior transformation of humanity by its supernatural aids.  On the one hand, the influence of Isaac Hecker’s Brook Farm surroundings was to persuade him to confide wholly in nature, which there was very nearly at its unaided best.  On the other hand, the treasures of Catholicity for the inner life were hidden from him.  Religion, in his conception of it—­in the true conception of it—­must be the binding of all things together, natural and supernatural.  Hence we find him at times complaining that the Church is not sufficient for his wants. If it were not personal in its adaptation to him, it was little that it should be historical this, hierarchical that, or biblical the other.  It must be his primarily, because he cannot live a rational and pure life without it.  An ordinarily decorous life, if you will; free from lust or passion, and without gross unreason, but nevertheless tame, unprogressive, dry and unproductive, without any absolute certainty except that of the helplessness of man.  Such a life seemed to him hardly more than a synonym for death.  “The fact is,” as he writes on a page now lying before us, “I want to live every moment.  I want something positive, living, nourishing.  I negative only by affirming.”

The earliest entry in this diary has been already quoted in the first

CHAPTER of the present biography.  On its second page occurs the following account of his impressions while in church on Easter Sunday: 

“Monday, April 17, 1843.—­Yesterday I went to the Catholic church at West Roxbury.  It was Easter Sunday.  The services were, to me, very impressively affecting.  The altar-piece represented Christ’s rising from the tomb, and this was the subject-matter of the priest’s sermon.  In the midst of it he turned and pointed to the painting, with a few touching words.  All eyes followed his, which made his remarks doubly affecting.  How inspiring it must be to the priest, when he is preaching, to see around him the Saviour, and the goodly company of martyrs, saints, and fathers!  There may be objections to having paintings and sculptures in churches, but I confess that I never enter a place where there is either but I feel an awe, an invisible influence, which strikes me mute.  I would sit in silence, covering my head.  A sanctified atmosphere seems to fill the place and to penetrate my soul when I enter, as if I were in a holy temple.  ‘Thou standest in a holy place,’ I would say.  A loud word, a heavy footstep, makes me shudder, as if an infidel were desecrating the place.  I stand speechless, in a magical atmosphere that wraps my whole being, scarcely daring to lift my eyes.  A perfect stillness comes over my soul; it seems to be soaring on the bosom of clouds.”