“The Heart says, ‘Be all that you can.’  The Intellect says, ’When you are all that you can be—­what then?’”

“Infinite love is the basis of the smallest act of love, and when we love with our whole being, we are in and one with God.”

“To love is to lose one’s self and gain God.  To be all in love is to be one with God.”

“When the Spirit begets us, we are no more; the Spirit is, and there is nothing else.”

“There is much debauchery in speaking wilfully.

“Every act of self is sin, is a lie.

“The Spirit will lead you into solitude and silence if it has something to teach you.

“You must be born again to know the truth.  It cannot be inculcated.

“To educate is to bring forth, not to put in.  To put in is death; to flow out is life.”

Lest the reader may have got an impression, from any of the extracts already given, that Isaac Hecker was puffed up by the pride of his own innocence, we transcribe what follows.  It shows that he did not fall under the Apostle’s condemnation:  “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”  It was written on the last Sunday of September, and, after this long outpouring of confession, longing, and weakness, the diary was not again resumed for nearly a month.  The desire expressed in its second paragraph for the kind of spiritual refreshment which in after years he so often enjoyed under the name of a “retreat,” seems noteworthy.

“September 24, 1843.—­The human heart is wicked above all things.  The enemy of man is subtle and watchful beyond conception.  Instead of being on the way of goodness, I am just finding out the wickedness of my nature, its crookedness, its impurity, its darkness.  I want deep humility and forgetfulness of self.  I am just emerging out of gross darkness and my sight is but dim, so that my iniquities are not wholly plain to my vision.

“At present I feel as if a week of quiet silence would be the means of opening more deeply the still flowing fountains of divine life.  I would cut off all relations but that of my soul with the Spirit—­all others seem intrusions, worldly, frivolous.  The inpouring of the Spirit is checked by so much attention to other than divine things.  In the bustle and noisy confusion its voice is unheard.

“I feel that one of my greatest weaknesses, because it leads me to so much sin, is my social disposition.  It draws me so often into perilous conversations, and away from silence and meditation with the Spirit.  Lately I have felt almost ready to say that good works are a hindrance to the gate of heaven.  Pride and self-approbation are so often mixed with them.  I feel that nothing has been spoken against the vain attempt to trust in good works which my soul does not fully accord with.  This is a new, a very new experience for me.”