"I am your Friend; the One who loves you. I have discovered myself to you and will do so yet more. But the condition of so doing requires from you even more faith, tenderness, and submissiveness.
"Nothing is so real, so near, so full of enjoyment as I am to you, and you cannot leave me without giving up the greater for the less.
"I talk to you at all times and am near you at all seasons, and my joy is to be in your presence, to love you and to take delight in this love I bestow upon you. I direct your pen, speech, thought, and affections, though you know it not sensibly. But you shall know more clearly who I am, and all respecting me, if you but comply with my requirements. You need not fear: you cannot make any mistakes if you submit to be guided by me."
Isaac Hecker had now tried every form of philosophy. Whoever sailed with Brownson on that voyage which ended on the shores of Catholic truth, had explored the deep seas and sounded the shoal waters of all human reason; and young Hecker had been Brownson's friend and sympathizer since the years of his own earliest mental activity. Pantheism, subjectivism, idealism, and all the other systems were tried, and when at last he was convinced that _Life is Real_ it was only after such an agony as must attend the imminent danger of fatal shipwreck.
He had, meantime, given a fair trial to philanthropy. Theoretically and practically, Isaac Hecker loved humanity; to make men happy was his ever-renewed endeavor; was, in truth, the condition on which his own happiness depended. For years this view of his life-task alternated with his search for exact answers to the questions his soul asked about man's destiny hereafter; or, one might rather say, social questions and philosophical ones borrowed strength from each other to assail him till his heart throbbed and his brain whirled with the agony of the conflict.
In a series of articles in _The Catholic World_ published in 1887, and before referred to, Father Hecker called Dr. Brownson's road to the Church the philosophical road. Finding that doctrines which his philosophical mind perceived to answer the deepest questions of the soul were taught only in one society, and there taught with authority, he argued validly that that society could lay claim to the right to teach. From the doctrine to the teacher, from the truth to the external authority that teaches it, is an inference of sound reason. This applies to Father Hecker's case also, for he was of a bent of mind truly philosophical, and he has placed on record the similarity of his philosophical difficulties with those of Brownson. But in addition to philosophical questions, and far more pressing, were to Isaac Hecker the problems arising from the mystical occurrences of which his soul was the theatre. Were these real? that is, were they more than the vagaries of a sensitive temperament, the wanderings of a sentimental imagination, or, to use Father Hecker's own words, "the mere projections into activity of feelings entirely subjective; mystical impulses towards no corresponding objective realities, or, at any rate, with objects which it is not possible to bring into the field of the really knowable? Some will admit that religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness, affirming, however, the subjectivity of all purely spiritual life; and no more can be said, they insist, for the principles, metaphysical and logical, with which they are associated in the spiritual life of man. Now, such a theory never leaves the soul that is governed by reason at rest. The problem ever and again demands solution: are these yearnings, aspirations, unappeased desires, or religious feelings--the ruling traits of the noblest men and women--are they genuine, real, corresponding to and arising from the reality of certain objects external to the soul? I think that in the solution of this problem Dr. Brownson fought and won his greatest victory; at any rate, it was to me the most interesting period of his life. No wonder, since I had the same battle to fight myself, and it was just at this epoch that I came into closest contact with him. We fought this battle shoulder-to-shoulder."--_Catholic World,_ October, 1887, pp. 5-6.