Читать книгу Life of Father Hecker - Walter Elliott - Страница 18

THE private journals from which we are about to quote so largely were an unhoped-for addition to the stock of materials available for Father Hecker's biography. Until after his death not even their existence, still less the nature of their contents, was suspected. With the exception of two important documents, one written while he was in Belgium, in obedience to the requirements of his director; the other in Rome, for the consideration of the four venerable religious whose advice he sought before founding his community, no records of his interior life have been discovered which are at all comparable in fulness to those made during the eighteen months which preceded his admission to the Church. In his years of health and strength he lived and worked for others; and in those weary ones of illness which followed them, he thought and wrote and suffered, but apparently without making any deliberate notes of his deeper personal experience.

On those of our readers whose acquaintance with Father Hecker dates, as our own does, from his intensely active and laborious prime, these revelations of the period when he was being passively wrought upon and shaped for his work by the hand of God, may produce an effect not unlike that we have been conscious of in studying the greater mass from which our extracts are taken. They will, perhaps, be struck, in the first place, by the unexpectedly strong witness they bear to the wholly interior and mystical experience of the man. They testify, moreover, to the real and objective character of that leading which he was constrained to follow; and not only that. They do so in a way which furnishes a convincing reply to a very plausible doubt as to whether the narrow and uncongenial surroundings of his early life might not, by themselves, be sufficient to explain the discontent of a poetic and aspiring nature such as his.

He was at Brook Farm when that community was at its pleasantest. The shadow of care and the premonition of failure were, indeed, already looming up before those who bore the chief responsibilities of the undertaking, but the group by virtue of whose presence it became famous had hardly begun to dwindle. And besides those whose names have since become well known, there were others, young, gay, intelligent, and well bred, acquaintance and familiarity with whom were in many ways attractive to a susceptible youth like Isaac Hecker. What impression he made upon the circle he entered, how cordially he was received and held in high esteem, our readers already know. And if he gave pleasure, he received it also. At first the new circumstances were a little strange and embarrassing to him. After a fortnight, or thereabouts, we find him noting that he is "not one of their spirits. They say 'Mr. Hecker' in a tone they do not use in speaking to each other." But the strangeness soon wore off and he yielded to the influence of the place with a wholeness which would have been entire but for the stronger drawing which never let him free.

On this point, too, the witness of the journal is peremptory. So it is as to the unity and consistence of his interior experiences from first to last. Child, and boy, and man, there was always the same ardent sincerity of purpose in him, the same docility to the Voice that spoke within, the same attitude toward "the life that now is" which Mr. Curtis, in the letter given in the preceding chapter, has described, with so fine an insight, as one of reserve and observation. "He was the dove floating in the air, not yet finding the spot on which his foot might rest," writes Mr. Curtis of Isaac Hecker at that period of his youth when his surroundings and companions were for the first time, and very possibly for the last, wholly congenial to his natural inclinations. And again: "There was nothing ascetic or severe in him; but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterward described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father's business."

These words are significant testimony to the nobility of the impression made on others by Father Hecker's personality in early manhood. Even if our only addition to such scanty knowledge of his life at Brook Farm as could be gathered from his own conversations in later years were this happily-touched sketch, it could hardly be more interesting than it is. But, fortunately, it does not stand alone. Its fine recognition of the lofty purity of his nature is everywhere borne out by the unpremeditated and candid self-revelations of the diary. Their characteristic trait is everywhere aspiration—a sense of joy in elevation above the earthly, or a sense of depression because the earthly weighs him down. Then come eager glances of inquiry in every direction for the satisfaction of his aspirations, little by little narrowing down to the Catholic Church, wherein the dove of Mr. Curtis's image was finally to rest his foot for ever. And in all this he scarcely at all mentions a dread of the Divine wrath as a motive for his flight. It is not out of the city of destruction, but toward the celestial city that he goes. He is drawn by what he wants, not hounded by what he fears. Always there is the reaching out of a strong nature toward what it lacks—a material for its strength to work on, a craving for rational joy, coupled with an ever-increasing conviction that nature cannot give him such a boon. Men who knew Father Hecker only in his royal maturity, sometimes cavilled at his words of emphatic faith in guileless nature; but they had only to know him a little better to learn his appreciation of the supernatural order, and his recognition of its absolute and exclusive competency to satisfy nature's highest aspirations. Reading these early journals, we have constantly recalled the later days when he so often, and sometimes continually, repeated, "Religion is a boon!" No one could know that better than he who had so deeply felt the want it satisfies.

The diary was begun in the middle of April, 1843, when Isaac had just returned to Brook Farm after a fortnight spent at home. It opens with a prayer for light and direction, which is its dedication to the uses not only of an earnest but a religious seeker. He addresses himself directly to God as Father, not making either appeal or reference to our Lord. But there is in it an invocation to those "that are in heaven to intercede and plead" for him, which recalls the fact, so often mentioned by him, that it was the teaching of the Catechism of the Council of Trent on the Communion of Saints which cleared away his final clouds and brought him directly to the Church. There is a note, too, among his later papers, in which, speaking of the phenomena of modern spiritualism, he says that the same longing for an assurance of personal immortality which leads so many into that maze of mingled truth and error, had a great share in disposing his mind to accept the authoritative doctrine of the Church, which here as elsewhere answered fully the deepest longings of his soul.

We shall not attempt to follow the chronological order of the journal with exactness, but in making our extracts shall pursue the order of topics rather than of time. By the middle of April the question of the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as the necessary preliminary to further progress—to be settled in one way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his struggles for and against it recur with especial frequency. Faber has said somewhere that the Church is the touchstone of rational humanity, and that probably no adult passes out of life without having once, at least, been brought squarely face to face with it and made to understand and shoulder the tremendous responsibility which its claims impose. There would be no need of a touchstone if there were no alloy in human nature, no feebleness in man's will, no darkness in his understanding. Were that the condition of humanity, the call to the supernatural order would be simply the summons to come up higher, its symbol a beacon torch upon the heights. As it is, the path may be mistaken. He whose feet have been set in it from birth by Christian training may wilfully forsake it. He whose heart is pure and whose aspirations noble, may be so surrounded by the mists of inherited error and misapprehension that the light of truth fails to penetrate them when it first dawns. The road is always strait which leads any son of Adam to supernal joy in conscious union with his Creator, even when his will is good and his desire unfeigned.

We shall find, therefore, that Isaac Hecker's struggles were many and painful before he fully recognized and attained the necessary means to the end he craved. They were characteristic also. He was looking for the satisfaction of his rational aspirations rather than for the solution of historical problems, although his mind was too clear not to see that the two are inextricably bound up together. But inasmuch as at the period of which we are writing, which was that of the Oxford Tracts, controversy turned mainly on questions of historical continuity and of Divine warrant in the external revelation of holy Scripture, it follows that he, and such as he, must have taken a lonely and unfrequented road towards the truth. Every time he looked at the Church he was greeted with the spectacle of unity and uniformity, of discipline and order. These are elements which always have been, and probably always will be, most attractive to the classes called educated, to men seeking for external notes of truth, flying from disorder, fearful of rebellion. But to Isaac Hecker, the only external note which deeply attracted him was that of universal brotherhood. If he were to bow his knee with joy to Jesus Christ, it would be because all, in heaven and earth or hell, should one day bend in union with him.

It takes an intimate knowledge of Catholicity to perceive the interior transformation of humanity by its supernatural aids. On the one hand, the influence of Isaac Hecker's Brook Farm surroundings was to persuade him to confide wholly in nature, which there was very nearly at its unaided best. On the other hand, the treasures of Catholicity for the inner life were hidden from him. Religion, in his conception of it—in the true conception of it—must be the binding of all things together, natural and supernatural. Hence we find him at times complaining that the Church is not sufficient for his wants. If it were not personal in its adaptation to him, it was little that it should be historical this, hierarchical that, or biblical the other. It must be his primarily, because he cannot live a rational and pure life without it. An ordinarily decorous life, if you will; free from lust or passion, and without gross unreason, but nevertheless tame, unprogressive, dry and unproductive, without any absolute certainty except that of the helplessness of man. Such a life seemed to him hardly more than a synonym for death. "The fact is," as he writes on a page now lying before us, "I want to live every moment. I want something positive, living, nourishing. I negative only by affirming."

The earliest entry in this diary has been already quoted in the first