THE private journals from which we are about to quote so largely were
an unhoped-for addition to the stock of materials available for
Father Hecker's biography. Until after his death not even their
existence, still less the nature of their contents, was suspected.
With the exception of two important documents, one written while he
was in Belgium, in obedience to the requirements of his director; the
other in Rome, for the consideration of the four venerable religious
whose advice he sought before founding his community, no records of
his interior life have been discovered which are at all comparable in
fulness to those made during the eighteen months which preceded his
admission to the Church. In his years of health and strength he lived
and worked for others; and in those weary ones of illness which
followed them, he thought and wrote and suffered, but apparently
without making any deliberate notes of his deeper personal experience.

On those of our readers whose acquaintance with Father Hecker dates,
as our own does, from his intensely active and laborious prime, these
revelations of the period when he was being passively wrought upon
and shaped for his work by the hand of God, may produce an effect not
unlike that we have been conscious of in studying the greater mass
from which our extracts are taken. They will, perhaps, be struck, in
the first place, by the unexpectedly strong witness they bear to the
wholly interior and mystical experience of the man. They testify,
moreover, to the real and objective character of that leading which
he was constrained to follow; and not only that. They do so in a way
which furnishes a convincing reply to a very plausible doubt as to
whether the narrow and uncongenial surroundings of his early life
might not, by themselves, be sufficient to explain the discontent of
a poetic and aspiring nature such as his.