rsistent
hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until
it had synthetized them into a coherent whole. That was his life-long
characteristic. During the years of painful ill health which preceded
his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to
the supernatural as if by instinct. "But I am a Saxon and cling to
the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason
why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed." He attributed this
to his racial peculiarities. Others may differ with him and credit it
to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity.
Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised. He
could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by
an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to
command. He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from
infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary
master.

Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of
orthodox Protestantism, was certain to reject it sooner or later,
impelled by hunger for the whole Divine gift of which that teaching
contains fragments only. The soul of Isaac Hecker was one athirst for
God from the first dawn of its conscious being. Upon Him, its Creator
and Source, it never lost hold, and never ceased to cry out for Him
with longing and aspiration, even during that bitter and protracted
period of his youth when his mind, entangled in the maze of
philosophic subjectivism, seemed in danger of rejecting theism
altogether. But the underpinning of his faith, so far as that
professed to be Christian and to come by hearing--to have an
intellectual basis, that is--began to slip away almost as soon as he
left his mother's knee. It is possible that very little stress was
ever laid upon distinctively Christian doctrines in her teaching. To
adore God the Creator, to listen to His voice in conscience, to live
honestly and purely as in His sight--the heritage she transmitted to
him probably contained little more than this. Like most others reared
in heresy who afterwards attain to the true knowledge of the
Incarnation, he had to seek for it with almost as great travail of
mind as if he had been born a pagan. It cannot be too strongly
insisted on, however, that his struggles were merely intellectual,
and, when they began to take a definite turn, shaped themselves into
the natural result of a metaphy