y
subjected him to a discipline so corrective as to be acknowledged by
him as judicial.

Isaac Hecker threw himself into public questions, then, because,
being a workman, he believed he saw ways by which the working classes
might be morally and socially elevated. He wanted for his class what
he wanted for himself. To get his views into shape, to press them
with all his force whenever and wherever an opportunity presented
itself, was for him the inescapable consequence of that belief. Like
his great patron, St. Paul, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" was
always his first question after his own illumination had been
granted. There is a note in the collection of private memoranda that
has been preserved, in which, alluding to the painful struggles which
preceded his clear recognition that the doctrines of the Catholic
Church afforded the adequate solution of all his difficulties, he
says that his interior sufferings were so great that the question
with him was "whether I should drown myself in the river or drown my
longings and doubts in a career of wild ambition." Still, to those
who knew him well, it is impossible to think of him as ever capable
of any ambition which had not an end commensurate with mankind
itself. To elevate men, to go up with them, not above them, was, from
first to last, the scope of his desire. The nature of his
surroundings in youth, his personal experience of the hardships of
the poorer classes, his intercourse with radical socialists, together
with the incomplete character of the religious training given him,
made him at first look on politics as a possible and probable means
to this desirable end. But he was too sensibly impelled by the Divine
impulse toward personal perfection, and too inflexibly honest with
himself, not to come early to a thorough realization, on one hand of
the fact that man cannot, unaided, rise above his natural level, and,
on the other, that no conceivable amelioration of merely social
conditions could satisfy his aspirations. And if not his, how those
of other men?

One thing that becomes evident in studying this period of Isaac
Hecker's life is the fact that his acquaintance with Dr. Brownson
marks a turning-point in his views, his opinions, his whole attitude
of mind toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then the Saviour of men
had been represented to him exclusively as a remedy against the fear
of hell; His use seemed to be to furnish a Divine point to which men
might w