me like liquid fire. He made some evasive answer and there it ended. Although to study has always been the secret desire of my heart from my youth, I never felt inclined to open my mind to any one on the subject. And now I find, after a long time, that I have been led here as strangely as possible."

His childhood seems to have been a serious one. In recurring to it in later life, as he often did, he never spoke of any games or sports in which he had shared, nor, in fact, of any amusements before the time when he began to attend lectures and the theatre. It was the childhood of what we call in America a self-made man—one in which the plastic human material is rudely dealt with by circumstances. His mother taught him his prayers, the schoolmistress his letters, necessity his daily round of duties, and for the rest he was left very much to himself and to that interior Master of whose stress and constraint upon him he grew more intimately conscious as he grew in years. The force of this inward pressure showed itself in many ways. Outwardly it made his manner undemonstrative, and fixed an intangible yet very real barrier between him and his kindred, even when the affection that existed was extremely close and tender. From infancy he exhibited that repugnance to touching or being touched by any one which marked him to the end. Even his mother refrained from embracing him, knowing this singular aversion. She would stroke his face, instead, when she was pleased with him, and say, "That is my kiss for you, my son."

The mutual respect for each other's personalities shown in this closest of human relations was characteristic of the entire family, as will be seen later, when the nature of the business connections between Isaac and his brothers has to be considered. Far from weakening the natural ties, or impairing their proper influence, it seems to have strengthened and perfected them. Asked once towards the close of his life how it was that he had never used tobacco in any form, he answered: "Mother forbade it, and that was enough for George and me. I was never ruled in any way but by her affection. That was sufficient." The parallel fact that he never in his life drank a drop of liquor at a bar or at any public place was probably due to a similar injunction. The children were brought up, too, with exceedingly strict ideas about lying and stealing, and all petty vices. Throughout the family there prevailed an extreme severity on such faults. "I have never forgotten," said Father Hecker, "the furious anger of an aunt of mine and the violent beating she gave one of my cousins for stealing a cent from her drawer. That training has had a great and lasting effect upon my character."

In such antecedents and surroundings it is easy to see the source of that abiding confidence in human nature, and that love for the natural virtues which marked Father Hecker's whole career. They had kept his own youth pure. He had been baptized in infancy, however, as the children of orthodox Protestants more commonly were at that period than at present, and in all probability validly, so that one could never positively say that nature in him had ever been unaided by grace in any particular instance. It is the conviction of those who knew him best that he had never been guilty of deliberate mortal sin. One of these writes:

"During all the intimate hours I spent with him, speaking of his past life he ever once said that he had been a sinner in a sense to convey the idea of mortal sin. And on the other hand he said much to the contrary; so much as to leave no manner of doubt on my mind that he had kept his baptismal innocence. He was deeply attached to an edifying and religious mother; he was at hard work before the dawn of sensual passion, and his recreation, even as a boy, was in talking and reading about deep social and philosophical questions, and listening to others on the same themes. He expressly told me that he had never used drink in excess, and that he had never sinned against purity, never was profane, never told a lie; and he certainly never was dishonest.

"The influence of his mother was of the most powerful kind. He told me that the severest punishment she ever inflicted on him was once or twice (once only, I am pretty sure) to tell him that she was angry with him; and this so distressed him that he was utterly miserable, sat down on the floor completely overcome, and so remained till she after a time relented and restored him to favor. Such a relationship is quite instructive in reference to the original innocence of his life."

________________________

CHAPTER II

YOUTH

It has been said already, in speaking of Father Hecker's childhood, that he had been consciously under the influence of supernatural impressions from a very early period. It seems probable, therefore, that at least during the few years which preceded his juvenile plunge into politics he must have been devout and prayerful, though doubtless in his own spontaneous way. Such were his mother's characteristics, and we find her son writing to her, when his aspirations after the perfect life had led him to the threshold of the church, that she, of all persons, ought most to sympathize with him, for he is about doing that which will aid him to be what she has always desired to see him. But his devotions probably bore small resemblance to those of the ordinary religiously minded boy, either Catholic or Protestant. He has said that often at night, when lying on the shavings before the oven in the bake-house, he would start up, roused in spite of himself by some great thought, and run out upon the wharves to look at the East River in the moonlight, or wander about under the spell of some resistless aspiration. What does God desire from me? How shall I attain unto Him? What is it He has sent me into the world to do? These were the ceaseless questions of a heart that rested, meanwhile, in an unshaken confidence that time would bring the answer.

But these were early days, days when the influence of his mother, never wholly shaken off, was still dominant and pervasive in all that concerned him. There came a period, however, beginning in all likelihood about his fourteenth, and lasting until his twentieth year or thereabouts, in which he certainly lost hold on all distinctively Christian doctrines. With such a mind as his, and such a training, this was almost inevitable. His intellect, while it hungered incessantly after supernatural truth, kept nevertheless a persistent hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until it had synthetized them into a coherent whole. That was his life-long characteristic. During the years of painful ill health which preceded his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to the supernatural as if by instinct. "But I am a Saxon and cling to the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed." He attributed this to his racial peculiarities. Others may differ with him and credit it to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity. Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised. He could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to command. He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary master.

Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of orthodox Protestantism, was certain to reject it sooner or later, impelled by hunger for the whole Divine gift of which that teaching contains fragments only. The soul of Isaac Hecker was one athirst for God from the first dawn of its conscious being. Upon Him, its Creator and Source, it never lost hold, and never ceased to cry out for Him with longing and aspiration, even