l. He interviewed ministers repeatedly.
"Not having had," he wrote in this magazine for November, 1887,
"personal and experimental knowledge of the Protestant denominations,
I investigated them all, going from one of them to another--Episcopal,
Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and all--conferring with their
ministers and reading their books. It was a dreary business, but I
did it. I knew Transcendentalism well and had been a radical
socialist. All was found to be as stated above. Brownson's ripe
experience and my own thoroughly earnest investigation tallied
perfectly. Indeed, the more you examine the Protestant sects in the
light of first principles the more they are found to weaken human
certitude, interfere with reason's native knowledge of God and His
attributes, and perplex the free working of the laws of human
thought. Protestantism is no religion for a philosopher, unless he is
a pessimist--if you can call such a being a philosopher--and adopts
Calvinism."

Why Calvinism, with its dread consistency of aversion for human
nature, did not attract him in these early inquiries was expressed by
Father Hecker in after years by the saying, "Heresy always involves a
mutilation of man's natural reason." The typical Calvinist foams
against man's natural capacity for the true and the good, and one of
its representatives, a Presbyterian minister, had the consistency to
say to our young disciple of nature, "Unless you believe that you are
totally depraved you will certainly suffer eternal damnation." These
words were spoken to one who felt some sort of apostleship growing
into act within his bosom: to preach the Gospel to those who are
totally depraved he perceived to be both vain and suicidal.
Furthermore, the consciousness of his own upright character, his
experience and observation of human virtue in others, made abstract
arguments needless to prove that Calvinism is an outrage on human
kind and a blasphemy against the Creator.

Anglicanism, too--uncleansed, as it notoriously is, of a Calvinistic
taint, broken up by absolute license of dissent, maintaining a mere
outward conformity to an extremely lax discipline--affronted Isaac
Hecker's ideal of the communion of man and God; man seeking and God
giving the one only revelation of divine truth, unifying and
organizing the Christian community: and this in spite of an
attraction for the beauty of the Episcopal service which he often
confesses in his diary.

In the same s