You are here

قراءة كتاب Life of Father Hecker

تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"

‏اللغة: English
Life of Father Hecker

Life of Father Hecker

تقييمك:
0
No votes yet
المؤلف:
دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 8

during that bitter and protracted period of his youth when his mind, entangled in the maze of philosophic subjectivism, seemed in danger of rejecting theism altogether. But the underpinning of his faith, so far as that professed to be Christian and to come by hearing—to have an intellectual basis, that is—began to slip away almost as soon as he left his mother's knee. It is possible that very little stress was ever laid upon distinctively Christian doctrines in her teaching. To adore God the Creator, to listen to His voice in conscience, to live honestly and purely as in His sight—the heritage she transmitted to him probably contained little more than this. Like most others reared in heresy who afterwards attain to the true knowledge of the Incarnation, he had to seek for it with almost as great travail of mind as if he had been born a pagan. It cannot be too strongly insisted on, however, that his struggles were merely intellectual, and, when they began to take a definite turn, shaped themselves into the natural result of a metaphysic as repugnant to common sense as it is to Christian philosophy. To this fact, so important in certain of its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on. They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda, jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last years of his life, by one whom he admitted to an unusually close intimacy. He was always singularly reserved concerning matters purely personal; his confidences, when they touched his own soul, seldom seemed entirely voluntary, and were quickly checked. Occasionally they were taken by surprise, as when the course of talk insensibly turned toward internal ways; and again they were deliberately angled for with a hook so well concealed that it secured a prize before he was aware. From these notes we shall here make a few quotations bearing on the point made above—i.e., that his difficulties prior to his entrance into the church were neither moral nor spiritual, but intellectual. Of him, if of any man, it was always true that his heart was naturally Christian. The first of these extracts, bearing as it does on a topic constantly in his thoughts, affords a good enough example of what was meant in saying that his confidences were sometimes taken by surprise:

"There are some for whom the predominant influence is the external one, authority, example, precept, and the like. Others in whose lives the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates. In my case, from my childhood God influenced me by an interior light and by the interior touch of His Holy Spirit."

At another time he said:

"While I was a youth, and in early manhood, I was preserved from certain sins and certain occasions of sin, in a way that was peculiar and remarkable. I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the time, conscious that God was preserving me innocent with a view to some future providence. Mind, all this was long before I came into the church."

And again:

"Many a time before my conversion God gave me grace to weep over those words: 'And all those who love His coming.' I did not believe in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to believe it. I had learned much of the Bible from my mother and had read it often and much myself."

This consciously supernatural character of his inner life from the first, should be kept closely united in the reader's mind with 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 unpopular features of our plan as far in the background as possible, to enlist the majority of the American people under the banner of the Workingman's party; nothing doubting that, if we could once raise that party to power, we could use it to secure the adoption of our educational system."

This party, however, both as an engine in politics and as a fitting embodiment of his private views, Dr. Brownson soon abandoned. He was not truly radical, in the evil sense of that word, at any period of his career, and the theories of the leaders soon became insupportable to his moral sense. But he remained true to the cause of the workingmen while abandoning the organization which assumed to voice their needs and their wishes. Probably these more ulterior aims of their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of those who followed them. Yet the genesis of the present purely secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property, and marriage was then an offence in the nostrils of our people at large. It is fair to predict that this generation, or another which shall succeed it, will yet have the good sense to regret, and the courage to atone for, the fact that hatred to the Catholic Church, and a desire to cripple her hands where her own children were concerned, should have been a more powerful agent in dragging them and theirs into the abyss of secularism than was their love of Christianity in deterring them from it.

Father Hecker's account of his own youthful connection with the "Workingman's Democracy," although written with the direct intention of placing his estimate of Dr. Brownson on record, has too many strictly autobiographic touches in it to be here omitted. Such passages, bearing on long past personal history, are fewer than we

Pages