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