ed Sacrament. How much
joy, love, and sweetness it is to the soul! I feel my soul to glow
again with renewed love when I have partaken of the blessed communion
of Christ. This is my spiritual food. It is the goodness, mercy, and
love of God which keeps me from sadness."

________________________

CHAPTER XX

FROM NEW YORK TO ST. TROND

ISAAC HECKER'S zeal for social reform lent force to his strictly
personal cravings for a more religious life; he longed for wider
scope than individual effort could possibly bestow, and also for a
supernatural point of vantage. "If we would do humanity any good," he
writes in his diary while considering his vocation, "we must act from
grounds higher than humanity; our standpoint must be above the race,
otherwise how can we act _upon_ humanity?" He also speaks of the
fundamental necessity of "an impulse of divine love" actuating the
reformer of social evils. He addresses himself thus: "If thou wouldst
move the race to greater good and higher virtue, lose thyself in the
Universal. Be so great as to give thyself to something nobler than
thyself if thou wouldst be ennobled, immortalized." In many pages of
the last two volumes of his diary these notes of sympathetic love for
his fellow-men are mingled with yearnings for solitude. "This book,"
he writes on the last page of one of them, "has answered some little
purpose; for when I wanted to speak to some one and yet was alone, it
cost me no labor to scribble in it. It would give me great pleasure
if I had a friend who would exchange such thoughts with me." He was
soon to enter into that spiritual heritage which among its other
treasures bestows the beatitude of the sage, "Blessed is the man who
hath found a true friend."

Little by little a distinctly penitential mood came over him, and it
occupies nearly the whole of the last volume of the diary with the
most unreserved expressions of grief for sin, or, rather, for a state
of sinfulness, since the specific mention of sins is nearly
altogether wanting. We meet with page after page of self-accusation
in general terms: "I am in want of greater love for those around me;
I perform my spiritual duties too negligently; too little of my time
is devoted to spiritual exercises. I feel all over sick with sin!
Here is my difficulty, O Lord, and do Thou direct me: I am always in
doubt, when I do not think of Thee alone, that I am sinning and that
my time is misspent."

His protestations of s