st nearing the certainty he afterwards
attained, should have sent a youth like Isaac Hecker to Brook Farm.
It must be remembered that Brownson's road to the Church was not so
direct as that of his young disciple, nor so entirely free in all its
stages from self-crippling considerations. As we shall presently see,
by an abstract of one of his sermons, preached in the spring of 1843,
which was made by Isaac Hecker at the time, Brownson thought it
possible to hold all Catholic truth and yet defer entering the Church
until she should so far abate her claims as to form a friendly
alliance with orthodox Protestantism on terms not too distasteful to
the latter. He was not yet willing to depart alone, and hoped by
waiting to take others with him, and he was neither ready to renounce
wholly his private views, nor to counsel such a step to young Hecker.
He was in harmony, moreover, with the tolerant and liberal tendency
which influenced the leading spirits at Brook Farm. Although he never
became one of the community, he had sent his son Orestes there as a
pupil, and was a frequent visitor himself. Their aims, as expressed
in a passage which we subjoin from _The Dial_ of January, 1842, were
assuredly such as would approve themselves to persons who fully
accepted what they believed to be the social teaching of our Lord,
but who had not attained to any true conception of the Divine
authority which clothes that teaching:

"Whoever is satisfied with society as it is; whose sense of justice
is not wounded by its common action, institutions, spirit of
commerce, has no business with this community; neither has any one
who is willing to have other men (needing more time for intellectual
cultivation than himself) give their best hours and strength to
bodily labor to secure himself immunity therefrom. . . . Everything
can be said of it, in a degree, which Christ said of His kingdom, and
therefore it is believed that in some measure it does embody His
idea. For its Gate of Entrance is strait and narrow. It is,
literally, a pearl _hidden in a field._ Those only who are willing to
lose their life for its sake shall find it. . . . Those who have not
the faith that the principles of Christ's kingdom are applicable to
this world, will smile at it as a visionary attempt."

Brook Farm has an interest for Catholics because, in the order of
guileless nature, it was the preamble of that common life which Isaac
Hecker afterwards enjoyed in its supern