nto Boston to hear Brownson
preach, and a day or two later made the subjoined shrewd comments on
the sermon in a letter to his mother:

"May 9, '43.--His intention is to preach the Catholic doctrine and
administer the Sacraments. How many of them, I suppose, depends on
circumstances. He justifies himself on the ground that he that is not
against us is for us, and that in times of exigency, and in
extraordinary cases, we may do what we could not be excused for doing
otherwise. And he thinks by proclaiming the Catholic faith and
repudiating the attempt to build up a Church, that in time the
Protestant world will become Catholic in its dispositions, so that a
unity will be made without submission or sacrifice. Under present
circumstances it would be impossible, even if the Protestant churches
should be willing to unite with the Catholic, that the Catholic could
even supply priests for forty millions of Protestants, the Protestant
priests being most of them married, etc.

"I confess the sermon was wholly unsatisfactory to me, un-catholic in
its premises, and many of his arguments and facts chimerical and
illusive. If you grant that the Roman Catholic Church is the true
Church, there is, to my thought, no stopping-place short of its
bosom. Or even if it is the nearest to the truth, you are under
obligations to join it. How any one can believe in either one of
those propositions, as 0. A. B. does, without becoming a Catholic in
fact, I cannot conceive. This special pleading of exceptions, the
necessity of the case, and improbable suppositions, springs more, I
think, from the position of the individual than from the importance
or truth of the arguments made use of. Therefore I think he will give
up in time the ground upon which he now supports his course--not the
object but his position. . . . I have bought a few Catholic books in
Boston which treat upon the Anglican claims to Catholicity, and I
think I can say, so far, I never shall join a Protestant
Church--while I am not positive on the positive side, nor even in any
way as yet decided."

________________________

CHAPTER VII

STRUGGLES

THE citations thus far made from Isaac Hecker's youthful diary,
although penned at Brook Farm, bear few traces of that fact. They
might have been written in a desert for all evidence they give of any
special influence produced upon him by personal contact with others.
It is not until the middle of May, 1843, that he begins to