is the condition of success into any study which had no direct
reference to it. We find him complaining at frequent intervals that
he cannot give his studies the attention they demand. Nor were his
labors as the community baker of long continuance. They left him too
little time at his own disposal, and in a short time he became a full
boarder, and occupied himself only as his inclinations directed.

It may occur to some of our readers to wonder why a man like
Brownson, who was then fast nearing the certainty he afterwards
attained, should have sent a youth like Isaac Hecker to Brook Farm.
It must be remembered that Brownson's road to the Church was not so
direct as that of his young disciple, nor so entirely free in all its
stages from self-crippling considerations. As we shall presently see,
by an abstract of one of his sermons, preached in the spring of 1843,
which was made by Isaac Hecker at the time, Brownson thought it
possible to hold all Catholic truth and yet defer entering the Church
until she should so far abate her claims as to form a friendly
alliance with orthodox Protestantism on terms not too distasteful to
the latter. He was not yet willing to depart alone, and hoped by
waiting to take others with him, and he was neither ready to renounce
wholly his private views, nor to counsel such a step to young Hecker.
He was in harmony, moreover, with the tolerant and liberal tendency
which influenced the leading spirits at Brook Farm. Although he never
became one of the community, he had sent his son Orestes there as a
pupil, and was a frequent visitor himself. Their aims, as expressed
in a passage which we subjoin from _The Dial_ of January, 1842, were
assuredly such as would approve themselves to persons who fully
accepted what they believed to be the social teaching of our Lord,
but who had not attained to any true conception of the Divine
authority which clothes that teaching: