"If a low passion usurps the place of pure love, if a blind prejudice usurps the place of Catholic truth, he who informs me of it, though he had been my enemy (if enemies it is possible for me to have), I will receive him as an angel from heaven, as an instrument of God. My honor, my consistency, my character consists in faithfulness to God's love, God's truth, and nothing else. Let me be but true to Him--how then can I be false to either man or the world? It is Him who knows our secret thoughts that we should fear (if fear we must) and obey."
Thus it was Anglicanism that engaged Isaac Hecker's last efforts to adjust a Protestant outside to his inward experience with the Holy Spirit; and this for a reason quite evident. That body pretended, then as now, to be the Catholic Christian Church, assisting men to union with God by a divinely-founded external organism, but not demanding the sacrifice of human liberty. To an inexperienced observer such as he, it seemed possible that Anglicanism might be the union of historical Christianity with manly freedom. Closer observation proved to him not only the compatibility of Catholicity and liberty, but that Anglicanism, though assuming some of the forms of Catholic unity, is kept alive by the principle of individual separatism common to all Protestant sects. For a time, or in a place, it may have much or little of Catholicity; but in no place can it live for a day without the Protestant principle of a right of final appeal to the individual judgment to decide upon the verity of doctrine.
"I HAVE been groping in darkness, seeking where Thou wast not, and I found Thee not. But, O Lord my God, _Thou hast found me_--leave me not."
These words are part of a long prayer written by Isaac Hecker in his diary April 23, 1844, after his arrival at Concord, Mass. He appears to have gone directly there from Carlisle, Pa., where he had spent some days with the Rev. William Herbert Norris, whose published letter to "A Sincere Enquirer" had excited in the young man a hope that he might find in him a teacher whose deep inward experiences would be complemented by the adequate external guaranty that he was seeking. We have already noted that he was disappointed. He states the reason very suggestively in a letter written at the time: