humanity at large is there any Divinity which responds to worship.

It is impossible to say just when Isaac Hecker's appreciation of this
truth became intensely personal and clear, but it is easy to make a
tolerable approximation to the time. He went to Brook Farm in
January, 1843, rather more than eight years after his first meeting
with Dr. Brownson. It was by the advice of the latter that he made
this first decisive break from his former life. From the time when
their acquaintance began, Isaac appears to have taken up the study of
philosophy in good earnest, and to have found in it an outlet for his
energies which insensibly diminished his absorption in social
politics. We have a glimpse of him kneading at the dough-trough with
Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ fastened up on the wall before him,
so that he might lose no time in merely manual labor. Fichte and
Hegel succeeded Kant, all of them philosophers whose mother-tongue
was likewise his own, and whose combined influence put him farther
off than ever from the solution of that fundamental doubt which
constantly grew more perplexing and more painful. We find him hiring
a seat in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, where Orville Dewey
was then preaching, and walking every Sunday a distance of three
miles from the foot of Rutgers Street, "because he was a smart
fellow, and I enjoyed listening to him. Did I believe in
Unitarianism? _No! I believed in nothing."_

His active participation in local politics did not continue
throughout all these years. His belief in candidates and parties as
instruments to be relied on for social purification received a final
blow very early--possibly before he was entitled to cast a vote. The
Workingmen had made a strong ticket one year, and there seemed every
probability of their carrying it. But on the eve of the election half