crupulous spirit he tried the Baptists, though he must
have known that they were, almost without exception, Calvinists. He
had a conference with one of their ministers which, from the account
he gives of it, must have degenerated into something like a wrangle.
"If," said young Hecker, "you admit that baptism is not a saving
ordinance, why, then, do you separate yourselves from the rest of
Christendom on a mere question of ceremonial observance?" There could
be no satisfactory answer to this question.

As to the Methodists, they made fifty years ago much less pretension
to an intellectual footing in the religious world than at the present
day. One thing, Father Hecker tells us, drew his sympathetic regards
their way--their doctrine of perfection. He went to one of their
ministers, a Dr. Crawford. "I have read in the Bible," said he, "'If
thou wouldst be perfect, go and sell all thou hast'; now, that is the
kind of Christian I want to be." The answer was: "Well, young man,
you must not carry things too far; you are too enthusiastic. Christ
does not require that of us in the nineteenth century." After
conversing with him for some time, the minister told him to give up
such ideas and study for the ministry.

A singular episode in his search was his meeting with two
enthusiastic Mormon apostles, and a long and careful examination,
under their guidance, of the then newly-delivered revelations and
prophecies of Joseph Smith. He describes his Mormon acquaintances as
men of some intelligence, but given over, totally and blindly, to
Smith's imposture.

But what cut under the claims of every form of Protestantism was the
error, common to them all, concerning the rule of faith: the private
and independent judgment of the teaching of Scripture made by each
man for himself. As the real owner of a homestead has most reason to
dread a dealer in false titles, so the truly free man has most reason
to dread false liberty. Isaac Hecker was the type of rational
individual liberty, hence the very man to abhor most the caricature
of that prerogative in the typical Protestant.

Five years before his death, in an article in _The Catholic World_
entitled "Luther and the Diet of Worms," Father Hecker put the case
thus: "It is a misapprehension common among Protestants to suppose
that Catholics, in refusing the appeal of Martin Luther at the Diet
of Worms, condemn the use of reason or individual judgment, or
whatever one pleases to call the p