"Every evil that society inflicts upon me, the germ of it is my own fault; in proportion as I free myself from my vices will I free myself from the evils which society inflicts upon me. Be true to thyself and thou canst not be false to any one. Be true to thyself and it follows as night follows day that others cannot be false to thee."
Of course this panacea offers only an inward healing, for none more readily admitted than he who wrote these sentences that in externals the true heart is often the first victim of the malice of the false heart.
Ever and again we find in the diary reflections on the general aspect of religion. The Protestant churches seemed to him to fail to meet the aspirations of the natural man; that is the burden of his complaint against them all. Some, like the Unitarians, did but offer man his best self and hence added nothing to humanity, while humanity at its best ceaselessly condemned itself as insufficient. This insufficiency of man for himself, Calvinistic and Lutheran Protestantism in their turn condemned as a depravity worthy of the deepest hell, making man a wretch maimed in his very nature so cruelly and fatally as to be damned for what he could not help being guilty of. Meantime the Catholic Church was seen by Isaac Hecker as having elements the most attractive. It recognized in man his native dignity; it saw in him a being made God-like by the attribute of reason, and called him to a state infinitely more God-like by a supernatural union with Christ. It understood his weakness, pitied it, and knew how to cure it. True, there are passages here in which his impatience with the public attitude of the Church betrays that his view of it was yet a distant one; they show, also, an undue concentration of his gaze upon social evils. "The Church is a great almoner," he says, "but what is she doing to ameliorate and improve the circumstances of the poorer and more numerous classes? She is more passive than active." "Instead of the Church being in the head and front of advancement, suffering martyrdom for Christ, she is in a conservative relation with society." Yet he adds: "We speak of the Church as she is exhibited by her bishops and clergy, and only in this sense."