On the first Sunday of May Isaac went into Boston to hear Brownson preach, and a day or two later made the subjoined shrewd comments on the sermon in a letter to his mother: 

“May 9, ’43.—­His intention is to preach the Catholic doctrine and administer the Sacraments.  How many of them, I suppose, depends on circumstances.  He justifies himself on the ground that he that is not against us is for us, and that in times of exigency, and in extraordinary cases, we may do what we could not be excused for doing otherwise.  And he thinks by proclaiming the Catholic faith and repudiating the attempt to build up a Church, that in time the Protestant world will become Catholic in its dispositions, so that a unity will be made without submission or sacrifice.  Under present circumstances it would be impossible, even if the Protestant churches should be willing to unite with the Catholic, that the Catholic could even supply priests for forty millions of Protestants, the Protestant priests being most of them married, etc.

“I confess the sermon was wholly unsatisfactory to me, un-catholic in its premises, and many of his arguments and facts chimerical and illusive.  If you grant that the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church, there is, to my thought, no stopping-place short of its bosom.  Or even if it is the nearest to the truth, you are under obligations to join it.  How any one can believe in either one of those propositions, as 0.  A. B. does, without becoming a Catholic in fact, I cannot conceive.  This special pleading of exceptions, the necessity of the case, and improbable suppositions, springs more, I think, from the position of the individual than from the importance or truth of the arguments made use of.  Therefore I think he will give up in time the ground upon which he now supports his course—­not the object but his position. . . .  I have bought a few Catholic books in Boston which treat upon the Anglican claims to Catholicity, and I think I can say, so far, I never shall join a Protestant Church—­while I am not positive on the positive side, nor even in any way as yet decided.”

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CHAPTER VII

STRUGGLES

THE citations thus far made from Isaac Hecker’s youthful diary, although penned at Brook Farm, bear few traces of that fact.  They might have been written in a desert for all evidence they give of any special influence produced upon him by personal contact with others.  It is not until the middle of May, 1843, that he begins to make any reference to his actual surroundings.

Before following him into these more intimate self-confidences, and especially before giving in his own words an account of that peculiar occurrence which so permanently affected his future, some preliminary remarks seem necessary.