It has been said already, in an earlier chapter of this biography, that but for some special intervention of Divine Providence, it is more than probable that Isaac Hecker would have led the ordinary life of men in the world, continuing, indeed, to cherish a high ideal of the duties of the citizen of a free country, but pursuing it along well-beaten ways.  There is no doubt that, unless some such event as he has narrated, or some influence equivalent to it in effect, had supernaturally drawn him away, he would of his own volition have sought what he was repeatedly advised to seek by his most attached friends, a congenial union in wedlock.  He was naturally susceptible, and his attachments were not only firm, but often seemed obstinate.  Of celibacy he had, up to this time, no other idea than such as the common run of non-Catholics possess.  At home, indeed, when afterwards pressed to seek a wife, he had answered, truly enough, though holding fast to his secret, that he “had no thought of marrying and felt an aversion to company for such an end.”  And again he writes to his mother, anxious and troubled for his future, that the circle which surrounded him in New York oppressed and contracted him, and abridged his liberty.  There was no one in it who “increased his life.”

But at Brook Farm he met some one, as is revealed by his diary and correspondence, who deeply attracted him, and who might have attracted him as far as marriage had he not already received the Holy Spirit’s prevenient grace of virginity.  That is to say, he found “a being,” to use his impersonal term, whose name and identity he is careful to veil, awkwardly enough at times with misleading pronouns, whose charm was so great as to win from him what would have been, in his normal state, a marital affection.  But he was no longer normal.  Although still beyond the visible pale of that garden of elect souls, God’s holy Church, he was already transformed by the quickening grace which “reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly.”  Our next quotations afford explicit proof on this point: 

“Tuesday, May 16.—­Life appears to be a perpetual struggle between the heavenly and the worldly.

“Here at Brook Farm I become acquainted with persons who have moved in a higher rank in society than I—­persons of good education and fine talents; all of which has an improving influence on me.  And I meet with those to whom I can speak, and feel that, to a great degree, I am understood and responded to.  In New York I am alone in the midst of people.  I am not in any internal sense en rapport with them.

“I suppose the reason why I do not, in my present state, feel disposed to connect myself with any being, and would rather avoid a person whom I was conscious I might or could love, is that I feel my life to be in a rapid progress, and that no step now would be a permanent one.  I am afraid the choice I would have made some time since (if there had not been something deeply secret in my being which prevented me) would now be very unsatisfactory.  I feel conscious there could not have been an equal and mutual advance, because the natures of some are not capable of much growth.  And I mistrust whether there would not have been an inequality, hence disharmony and unhappiness.