ital principle of Protestantism; suppose all
these evident assumptions as true. Would the Bible even in that case
suffice to make any one man, woman, or child a Christian? Evidently
not. And why? For that is a personal work, and the personal work of
Christ; for Christ alone can make men Christians. And no account of
Christ is Christ. . . The contents of a book, whatever these may be,
are powerless to place its readers in direct contact and vital
relations with its author. No man is so visionary as to imagine that
the mental operation of reading the _Iliad,_ or the _Phaedo,_ or the
_Divine Comedy,_ suffices to put him in communication with the
personality of Homer, or Plato, or Dante. All effort is in vain to
slake the thirst of a soul famishing for the _Fountain_ of living
waters from a brook, or to stop the cravings of a soul for the living
Saviour with a printed book. . . . His words are 'Come unto ME all
that are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you.' It was the
attempt to make men Christians by reading the Bible that broke
Christendom into fragments, multiplied jarring Christian sects,
produced swarms of doubters, filled the world with sceptics and
scoffers at all religion, frustrated combined Christian action, and
put back the Christian conquest of the world for centuries. Three
centuries of experience have made it evident enough that, if
Christianity is to be maintained as a principle of life among men, it
must be on another footing than the suicidal hypothesis invented in
the sixteenth century after the birth of its divine Founder."

His farewell interviews with exponents of the Protestant claims were
mainly, if not wholly, with representatives of Anglicanism. This did
not arise from any grounded hope of getting all he wanted there, but
from an insensible drift of his mind upon those currents of thought
set in motion by the great power of Newman. The air was full of
promise of non-Roman Catholicity, and the voices which called the
English-speaking world to listen were the most eloquent since
Shakespeare. It needed but a dim hope pointing along any road to
induce the delicate conscience of Isaac Hecker to try if it might not
be a thoroughfare. But neither in his copious entries in the diary at
this period, nor in his articles in this magazine for the year 1887
on Dr. Brownson's difficulties--and these were much like his own--do
we find any trace of his discovering in Anglicanism a germ of
Catholicity unf