orrow are extremely fervent and very numerous;
and as the Lent of 1845 approached he records his purpose of
restricting himself to one meal a day. As he never ate meat, nor any
"product of animal life," and drank only water, his "nuts, bread, and
apples" once a day must have been his diet all through the
penitential season. The reader will remember _ein herrliches Essen_
at Concord: "bread, maple-sugar, and apples."

In the middle of February he opened his mind more fully to Bishop
McCloskey, whom he continually calls his spiritual director. He had
now to reveal the discoveries of holy penance, and to add to his
other motives for leaving the world the dread of falling into mortal
sin. He had, he tells us, misgivings as to whether he was ambitious
or not. One of his spiritual states he thus alludes to:

"I will ask my confessor how it is--if it is so with others, that
they feel no sense of things, no joy, no reality, no emotion, no
impulse, nothing positive within or around," but only the
consciousness of the need of a terrible atonement. This is
accompanied by frantic prayers to God, invocations of the Blessed
Virgin, St. Francis of Assisi and other saints. And he says that he
has been told that he is scrupulous, and complains that at confession
he can only accuse himself in general terms.

Complete abandonment to the divine will seems to have been the
outcome of a season of much distress of soul, and bodily
mortification. On April 2 he writes: "The last time I saw my director
he spoke to me concerning the sacred ministry, and this is a subject
I feel an unspeakable difficulty about. I told him that I desired to
place myself wholly in his hands and should do whatever he directed.
I do not wish to be any more than nothing. I give myself up. So far
the Lord seems to be with me, and I hope that He will not forsake me
in the future."

As might have been anticipated, Bishop McCloskey's advice was wise.
Plainly, his own hope was that young Hecker should enter the secular
priesthood, but there is no evidence in the numerous references to
the matter in the diary, that this caused him to do more than make
his young friend fully acquainted with that state of life. He had him
call at the newly-opened diocesan seminary at Fordham and become
acquainted with the professors. Bishop Hughes, whom he also
consulted, urged him to go to St. Sulpice in Paris, and to the
Propaganda in Rome, and make his studies for the secular priesthoo