Oxford Tracts, controversy turned mainly on questions of historical
continuity and of Divine warrant in the external revelation of holy
Scripture, it follows that he, and such as he, must have taken a
lonely and unfrequented road towards the truth. Every time he looked
at the Church he was greeted with the spectacle of unity and
uniformity, of discipline and order. These are elements which always
have been, and probably always will be, most attractive to the
classes called educated, to men seeking for external notes of truth,
flying from disorder, fearful of rebellion. But to Isaac Hecker, the
only external note which deeply attracted him was that of universal
brotherhood. If he were to bow his knee with joy to Jesus Christ, it
would be because all, in heaven and earth or hell, should one day
bend in union with him.

It takes an intimate knowledge of Catholicity to perceive the
interior transformation of humanity by its supernatural aids. On the
one hand, the influence of Isaac Hecker's Brook Farm surroundings was
to persuade him to confide wholly in nature, which there was very
nearly at its unaided best. On the other hand, the treasures of
Catholicity for the inner life were hidden from him. Religion, in his
conception of it--in the true conception of it--must be the binding
of all things together, natural and supernatural. Hence we find him
at times complaining that the Church is not sufficient for _his
wants._ If it were not personal in its adaptation to him, it was
little that it should be historical this, hierarchical that, or
biblical the other. It must be his primarily, because he cannot live
a rational and pure life without it. An ordinarily decorous life, if
you will; free from lust or passion, and without gross unreason, but
nevertheless tame, unprogressive, dry and unproductive, without any
absolute certainty except that of the helplessness of man. Such a
life seemed to him hardly more than a synonym for death. "The fact
is," as he writes on a page now lying before us, "I want to live
every moment. I want something positive, living, nourishing. I
negative only by affirming."

The earliest entry in this diary has been already quoted in the first

CHAPTER of the present biography. On its second page occurs the
following account of his impressions while in church on Easter Sunday:

"Monday, April 17, 1843.--Yesterday I went to the Catholic church
at West Roxbury. It was Easter Sunday. The services were