“Wednesday.—­About ten months ago—­perhaps only seven or eight—­I saw (I cannot say I dreamed; it was quite different from dreaming; I was seated on the side of my bed) a beautiful, angelic being, and myself standing alongside of her, feeling a most heavenly pure joy.  It was as if our bodies were luminous and gave forth a moon-like light which sprung from the joy we experienced.  I felt as if we had always lived together, and that our motions, actions, feelings, and thoughts came from one centre.  When I looked towards her I saw no bold outline of form, but an angelic something I cannot describe, though in angelic shape and image. It was this picture that has left such an indelible impression on my mind. For some time afterward I continued to feel the same influence, and do now so often that the actual around me has lost its hold. In my state previous to my vision I should have married ere this, for there are those I have since seen who would have met the demands of my mind. But now this vision continually hovers over me and prevents me, by its beauty, from accepting any one else; for I am charmed by its influence, and conscious that, should I accept any other, I should lose the life which would be the only one wherein I could say I live.”

Those of our readers who are either versed in mystical theology or who have any wide knowledge of the lives of the Church’s more interior saints, with neither of which Isaac Hecker had at this time any acquaintance, will be apt to recall here St. Francis of Assisi and his bride, the Lady Poverty, the similar occurrences related by Henry Suso of himself, and the mystic espousals of St. Catharine.  We have in this relation not only the plainly avowed reason why he accepted the celibate life, even before entering the Church or arriving at any clear understanding of his duty to do so, but we have something more.  Not yet certain of his own vocation, the dream of a virginal apostolate, including the two sexes, had already absorbed his yearnings, never again to be forgotten.  Neither priest nor Catholic, save in the as yet unrevealed ordinance of God, he was no longer free to invite any woman to marriage, no matter how deeply he might be sensible of her feminine attraction.  The union of souls?  Yes; for uses worthy of souls.  The union of bodies?  No; that would only clip his wings and narrow his horizon.  Thenceforward the test of true kinship with him could only be a kindred aspiration after union in liberty from merely natural trammels, in order to tend more surely to a supernatural end.

This may seem to some a strange beginning to a life so simply and entirely set apart from the active, or, at least, public union of the sexes in apostolic labors.  Strange or not, the reader will see it to be more true as this biography proceeds, and its writer is not conscious of any reluctance to make it known.  Such an integral supernatural mission to men was what he ever after desired and sought to