“O God, be Thou my helper, my strength and my redeemer!  May I live wholly to Thee; give me grace and obedience to Thy Spirit.  May all self be put from me so that I may enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, Awaken me, raise me up, restore me, O Jesus Christ, Lord, Heavenly King!”

In reading what next follows it must be remembered that at the time when it was written Isaac Hecker had absolutely no knowledge of Catholic mystical theology.  It is since that day that English-speaking Catholics have had access to the great authorities on this subject through adequate translations.  But what little he had learned from other sources, combined with his own intuitional and experimental knowledge of human capabilities for penetrating the veil, had already furnished him with conclusions which nothing in his devoted study of Catholic mystical writers forced him to lay aside: 

“Belief in the special guidance of God has been the faith of all deeply religious men.  I will not dispute the fact that some men are so guided, but will offer an explanation of it which seems to me to reconcile it with the regular order of laws established by God.  My explanation would be that this guidance is not a miraculous power, specially bestowed upon some men, but merely a higher degree of ordinary divine guidance.  Our ordinary life is inspired; the other is only a higher degree of what is common to all.  The evil which arises from the contrary opinion is this:  men who have received a higher degree of insight believe that it is a special miraculous gift, and that all they may say is infallibly true, whereas they still retain their own individuality though raised to a purer state of being.  They have not been so raised in order to found new sects, or to cause revolutions, but to fulfil the old, continue and carry it on as far as they have been given light to do so.  In forming new sects they but reproduce their own individualities with all their errors.  So Swedenborg did, and Wesley, men of modern times who were awakened in a greater degree than the mass of their fellows.  Their mistake lay in their attempt to make universal ends out of their individual experiences.  In the ordinary state no man does this, but these, being lifted a little above the mass, became intoxicated.  The only one, so far as I have read, who has had humility equal to his inspiration was Jacob Boehmen.  Luther, Calvin, Fox, Penn, Swedenborg, Wesley, had self in view.  Selfism is mixed with their universalism.  None has spoken truth so pure and universal as Boehmen.  He is the most inspired man of modern times.  He had more love and truth than all the other mystics put together, and fewer faults than either one of them taken singly.”

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CHAPTER X

AT HOME AGAIN

IT was the middle of August, 1843, when Isaac Hecker once more took up his residence with his family in New York.  His first endeavor was to sink back again as far as possible into the old routine of business.