adequacy to lead
man to his destiny. Bringing the reader back to the Church, the
fourteen last chapters fully develop her claims, dealing mostly with
known facts and public institutions, and citing largely the testimony
of non-Catholic writers.

It is something like the inductive method to infer the existence of a
God from that of an admitted appetite, as also to learn the kind of
food from the nature of the organs provided by nature for its
reception and digestion. So the longings of man's moral nature,
Father Hecker felt, when fairly understood, must lead to the
knowledge of what he wants for their satisfaction--the Infinite
Good--and that by a process of reasoning something equivalent to the
scientific. Such is the statement of his case, embracing with its
argument the introductory chapters. The inquiry then extends to the
claimants in the religious world, not simply as to which is
biblically authentic or historically so, but rather as to which
religion claims to satisfy the entire human want of God and makes the
claim good as an actual fact. It is wonderful how this line of
argument simplifies controversy, and no less wonderful to find how
easily the victory is won by the Catholic claim. The reader will also
notice how consistent all this is with Father Hecker's own experience
from the beginning.

The literary faults of the book are not a few; for if the argument is
compact, its details seem to have been hastily snatched up and put
together, or perhaps the occupations of the missions prevented
revision and consultation. There is a large surplusage of quotations
from poets, many of them obscure, and worthy of praise rather as
didactic writers than as poets; yet every word quoted bears on the
point under discussion. To one who has labored in preparing sermons,
each chapter looks like the cullings of the preacher's commonplace
book set in order for memorizing; and very many sentences are
rhetorically faulty. But, in spite of all these defects, the book is
a powerful one, and nothing is found to hurt clearness or strength of
expression. What we have criticised are only bits of bark left
clinging to the close-jointed but rough-hewn frame-work.

The _Questions of the Soul_ was got out by the Appletons, and was at
the time of its publication a great success, and still remains so.
The reason is because the author takes nothing for granted, propounds
difficulties common to all non-Catholics, sceptics as well as
professi