It may occur to some of our readers to wonder why a man like Brownson, who was then fast nearing the certainty he afterwards attained, should have sent a youth like Isaac Hecker to Brook Farm. It must be remembered that Brownson's road to the Church was not so direct as that of his young disciple, nor so entirely free in all its stages from self-crippling considerations. As we shall presently see, by an abstract of one of his sermons, preached in the spring of 1843, which was made by Isaac Hecker at the time, Brownson thought it possible to hold all Catholic truth and yet defer entering the Church until she should so far abate her claims as to form a friendly alliance with orthodox Protestantism on terms not too distasteful to the latter. He was not yet willing to depart alone, and hoped by waiting to take others with him, and he was neither ready to renounce wholly his private views, nor to counsel such a step to young Hecker. He was in harmony, moreover, with the tolerant and liberal tendency which influenced the leading spirits at Brook Farm. Although he never became one of the community, he had sent his son Orestes there as a pupil, and was a frequent visitor himself. Their aims, as expressed in a passage which we subjoin from _The Dial_ of January, 1842, were assuredly such as would approve themselves to persons who fully accepted what they believed to be the social teaching of our Lord, but who had not attained to any true conception of the Divine authority which clothes that teaching:
"Whoever is satisfied with society as it is; whose sense of justice is not wounded by its common action, institutions, spirit of commerce, has no business with this community; neither has any one who is willing to have other men (needing more time for intellectual cultivation than himself) give their best hours and strength to bodily labor to secure himself immunity therefrom. . . . Everything can be said of it, in a degree, which Christ said of His kingdom, and therefore it is believed that in some measure it does embody His idea. For its Gate of Entrance is strait and narrow. It is, literally, a pearl _hidden in a field._ Those only who are willing to lose their life for its sake shall find it. . . . Those who have not the faith that the principles of Christ's kingdom are applicable to this world, will smile at it as a visionary attempt."