th that
other idea of his adhesion to "guileless nature" which was such a
favorite theme with Father Hecker. No one could be more emphatic than
he in asserting the necessity of the supernatural for the attainment
of man's destiny. How could it be otherwise, when he considered that
destiny to be the elevation of man above all good merely human, and
by means far beyond the compass of his natural powers? Still, this
was undoubtedly a conclusion of his riper years, a result arrived at
after a certain intense if not very prolonged experience in
contemporary Utopias, in futile endeavors to raise man above his own
level while remaining on it, whether by socialistic schemes or social
politics.

In an article called "Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty
Years Ago," published in _The Catholic World_ of May, 1887, Father
Hecker has himself made some interesting references to his
experiences in the latter field, and upon these we shall draw heavily
for our own account of this period of his life, supplementing them
with whatever bears upon the subject in the memoranda already
referred to.

Concerning the inception of this party, to which all three of the
young Heckers belonged in 1834, we have a better statement in Dr.
Brownson's _Convert_ than we know of elsewhere. Brownson was for a
time actively interested in it, and in 1829 established a journal in
support of its principles somewhere in Western New York. From him we
learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L.
Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other
doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting
control of political power so as to use it for establishing purely
secular schools. Their advocacy of anti-Christian and free-love
doctrines had so signally failed among adult Americans that the
slower but surer method of educating the children of the country
without religion had dawned upon them as more certain to succeed.

"We hoped," writes Dr. Brownson, "by linking our cause with the
ultra-democratic sentiment of the country, which had had from the
time of Jefferson and Tom Paine something of an anti-Christian
character; by professing ourselves the bold and uncompromising
champions of equality; by expressing a great love for the people and
a deep sympathy with the laborer, whom we represented as defrauded
and oppressed by his employer; by denouncing all proprietors as
aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopul