companionship, and on the other by his complete unacquaintance with a kind of reading which even at this point might have shed some light upon his interior difficulties.  In later years he enjoyed, in the study of accredited Christian mystics, that kind of satisfaction which a traveller experiences who, after long wanderings in what had seemed a trackless desert, obtains a map which not only makes his whole route plain, but assures him that he did not stray from well-known paths even during his times of most extreme bewilderment.

That the diary has the character we here claim for it, and is not the mere ordinary result of a morbid and aimless introspection, is plainly shown by the speedy cessation of excessive self-analysis on Father Hecker’s part, after he had actually reached the goal to which he was at this period alternately sweetly led and violently driven.  But it is also shown by the deep humility which is revealed precisely by this sharp probing of his interior.  Though he felt himself in touch with God in some special way, yet it was with so little pride that it was his profound conviction, as it remained, indeed, throughout his life, that what he had all had or might have.  But the study of his interior thus forced upon him was far from a pleasing task.  “It is exceedingly oppressive to me to write as I now do,” we find him complaining; “continually does myself appear in my writing.  I would that my I were wholly lost in the sea of the Spirit—­wholly lost in God.”

We preface the subjoined extract from the diary with the remark that Father Hecker’s reading of signs of the Divine will in men and events often brought him to the verge of credulity, over which he was prevented from stepping by his shrewd native sense.  Though he insisted all his life on interpreting them as signal flags of the Divine wisdom, this did not hinder him from gaining a reputation for sound practical judgment: 

“Brook Farm, July 31, 1843.—­Man is the symbol of all mysteries.  Why is it that all things seem to me to be instinct with prophecy?  I do not see any more individual personalities, but priests and oracles of God.  The age is big with a prophecy which it is in labor to give birth to.”

“My experience is different now from what it has been.  It is much fuller; every fibre of my being seems teeming with sensitive life.  I am in another atmosphere of sentiment and thought. . . .  I have less real union and sympathy with her, and with those whom I have met much nearer heretofore.  It appears as if their atmosphere was denser, their life more natural, more in the flesh.  Instead of meeting them on my highest, I can only do so by coming down into my body, of which it seems to me that I am now almost unconscious.  There is not that sense of heaviness, dulness, fleshliness, in me.  I experience no natural desires, no impure thoughts, nor wanderings of fancy.  Still, I feel more intensely, and am filled to overflowing with love, and with desire for union.  But there is no one to meet me where I am, and I cannot meet them where they are.”