weapon to slay and a talisman to raise to life. Never was
argumentation made more delightful reading; never did a master
instruct more exclusively by the aid of his disciple's highest
faculties than did Brownson. Habituated his whole life long to the
ardent study of the greatest topics of the human understanding, he
was able to teach all, as he had taught young Hecker, how to think,
discern, judge, penetrate, decide about them with matchless power;
and he clothes his conclusions in language as adequate to express
them as human language well can be. Clearness, precision, force,
purity, vividness, loftiness are terms applicable to Dr. Brownson's
literary style. It may be that the general reading public will not
study his works merely for the sake of his literary merits; the
pleasures of the imagination and of narrative are not to be found in
Dr. Brownson. But he certainly will win his way to the suffrages of
the higher class of students of fine writing. And let one have any
shadow of interest in the great questions he treats, and every page
displays a style which is the rarest of literary gifts. The very fact
that his writing is untinted by those lesser beauties which catch the
eye but to impede its deepest glances, is in itself an excellence all
the greater in proportion to the gravity of his topics. Absolutely
free from the least obscurity, his diction is a magnetic medium
uniting the master's personality, the disciple's understanding, and
the essence of the subject under consideration. Cardinal Newman, some
may believe, possessed this supreme rhetoric in perhaps even a higher
degree than Brownson, but so much can be said of few other writers of
English prose. George Ripley, whom Father Hecker deemed the best
judge of literature in our country or elsewhere, assured him that
there were passages in Dr. Brownson which could not be surpassed in
the whole range of English literature.

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CHAPTER XIX

YEARNINGS AFTER CONTEMPLATION

"COULD I but give up all my time to contemplation, study, reading,
and reflection!"

Upon this aspiration as a background the whole matter of Isaac
Hecker's vocation must be considered. In substance we have met with
it very frequently already; in the shape just given it confronts us
on the first page of the new diary begun a few days before his
baptism. And as our reader accompanies us through the records he made
during the year that still elapsed before he ente