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 metaphysic as repugnant to common sense as it
is to Christian philosophy. To this fact, so important in certain of
its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept
before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on.
They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda,
jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last
years of his life, by one whom he admitted to an unusually close
intimacy. He was always singularly reserved concerning matters purely
personal; his confidences, when they touched his own soul, seldom