ork themselves up by an emotional process resulting in an
assurance of forgiveness of sin and a secure hope of heaven.
Christianity, that is to say, had been presented to him under the
form of Methodism. The result had been what might have been
anticipated in a nature so averse to emotional excitement and
possessing so little consciousness of actual sin. Drawn to God as he
had always been by love and aspiration, he was not as yet sensible of
any gulf which needed to be bridged between him and his Creator;
hence, to present Christ solely as the Victim, the Expiatory
Sacrifice demanded by Divine Justice, was to make Him, if not
impossible, yet premature to a person like him. Meantime, what he saw
and heard all around him, poverty, inequality, greed, shiftlessness,
low views of life, ceaseless and poorly remunerated toil, made
incessant demands upon him. These things he knew by actual contact,
by physical, mental, and moral experience, as a man knows by touch
and taste and smell. Men's sufferings, longings, struggles,
disappointments had been early thrust upon him as a personal and most
weighty burden; and the only relief yet offered was the Christ of
emotional Methodism. To a nature more open to temptation on its lower
side, and hence more conscious of its radical limitations, even this
defective presentation of the Redeemer of men might have appealed
profoundly. But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly
social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained
until the end. Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an
extravagant form of individualism. Its Christ deals with men apart
from each other and furnishes no cohesive element to humanity. The
validity and necessity of religious organization as a moral force of
Divine appointment is that one of the Catholic principles which it
has from the beginning most vehemently rejected. As a negative force
its essence is a protest against organic Christianity. As a positive
force it is simply men, taken one by one, dealing separately with God
concerning matters strictly personal. True, it is a fundamental
verity that men must deal individually with God; but the external
test that their dealings with Him have been efficacious, and their
inspirations valid, is furnished by the fact of their incorporation
into the organic life of Christendom. As St. Paul expresses it: "For
as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the
body, wh