One thing that becomes evident in studying this period of Isaac
Hecker's life is the fact that his acquaintance with Dr. Brownson
marks a turning-point in his views, his opinions, his whole attitude
of mind toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Until then the Saviour of men
had been represented to him exclusively as a remedy against the fear
of hell; His use seemed to be to furnish a Divine point to which men
might work 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