red the Redemptorist
Order, nothing, we think, will become more evident than that he was
called to something beyond adhesion to the Church, the worthy
reception of the sacraments, or even the ordinary sacerdotal state.

To make this still plainer at the start, it may be useful to describe
briefly the special grounds whereon Isaac Hecker fought his life-long
battles. These were, first: The validity of those natural aspirations
which are called religious, and which embrace the veracity of reason
in its essential affirmations. Second: Whether man be by nature
guileless or totally depraved: Third, Whether religion be or be not
intrinsically and primarily an elevating influence whose end is to
raise men to real union with God.

To many inquirers after the true religion such preliminary doubts
have been already settled, either by natural bent of mind or docility
to previous training; and they pass on to consider apostolical
succession, the primacy of Peter, the nature and number of the
sacraments, and other matters wherein heresy errs by denial or by
defect. But to Isaac Hecker all such points as these were, in a
sense, subsidiary. He had asked admission into the Church because he
found it to be the only teaching society on earth whose doctrines
gave complete and adequate satisfaction to that fundamental craving
of his nature which prompted his questions. She accredited herself to
him as fully by that fact as she must have done to many a philosophic
pagan among those who were the first disciples to the new faith
preached by St. John or St. Paul. All else he accepted with an
implicit, child-like confidence not different from that which moves
the loyal descendant of ages of Catholic ancestors. It was clear to
him that these accompanying doctrines and institutions must have been
enfolded within the original germ, and must be received on the same
authority, not by an analytic process and on their merits, one by one.

What he wanted was, in the first place, sustenance for what he
invariably calls "the life" given him; and next, light to see in what
way he was to put to use the strength so gained. The first effect of
the sacraments was what one might call the natural one of making more
visible the shadows which enveloped his path, as well as stimulating
his instinctive efforts to pierce through them. After the rapturous
joy which succeeded confession and absolution, a period of desolation
and dryness heavier than he had ever kno