make any
reference to his actual surroundings.

Before following him into these more intimate self-confidences, and
especially before giving in his own words an account of that peculiar
occurrence which so permanently affected his future, some preliminary
remarks seem necessary.

It has been said already, in an earlier chapter of this biography,
that but for some special intervention of Divine Providence, it is
more than probable that Isaac Hecker would have led the ordinary life
of men in the world, continuing, indeed, to cherish a high ideal of
the duties of the citizen of a free country, but pursuing it along
well-beaten ways. There is no doubt that, unless some such event as
he has narrated, or some influence equivalent to it in effect, had
supernaturally drawn him away, he would of his own volition have
sought what he was repeatedly advised to seek by his most attached
friends, a congenial union in wedlock. He was naturally susceptible,
and his attachments were not only firm, but often seemed obstinate.
Of celibacy he had, up to this time, no other idea than such as the
common run of non-Catholics possess. At home, indeed, when afterwards
pressed to seek a wife, he had answered, truly enough, though holding
fast to his secret, that he "had no thought of marrying and felt an
aversion to company for such an end." And again he writes to his
mother, anxious and troubled for his future, that the circle which
surrounded him in New York oppressed and contracted him, and abridged
his liberty. There was no one in it who "increased his life."

But at Brook Farm he met some one, as is revealed by his diary and
correspondence, who deeply attracted him, and who might have
attracted him as far as marriage had he not already received the Holy
Spirit's prevenient grace of virginity. That is to say, he found "a
being," to use his impersonal term, whose name and identity he is
careful to veil, awkwardly enough at times with misleading pronouns,
whose charm was so great as to win from him what would have been, in
his normal state, a marital affection. But he was no longer normal.
Although still beyond the visible pale of that garden of elect souls,
God's holy Church, he was already transformed by the quickening grace
which "reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things
sweetly." Our next quotations afford explicit proof on this point:

"Tuesday, May 16.--Life appears to be a perpetual struggle between
the heavenly and