competency to satisfy nature's highest aspirations. Reading these
early journals, we have constantly recalled the later days when he so
often, and sometimes continually, repeated, "Religion is a boon!" No
one could know that better than he who had so deeply felt the want it
satisfies.

The diary was begun in the middle of April, 1843, when Isaac had just
returned to Brook Farm after a fortnight spent at home. It opens with
a prayer for light and direction, which is its dedication to the uses
not only of an earnest but a religious seeker. He addresses himself
directly to God as Father, not making either appeal or reference to
our Lord. But there is in it an invocation to those "that are in
heaven to intercede and plead" for him, which recalls the fact, so
often mentioned by him, that it was the teaching of the Catechism of
the Council of Trent on the Communion of Saints which cleared away
his final clouds and brought him directly to the Church. There is a
note, too, among his later papers, in which, speaking of the
phenomena of modern spiritualism, he says that the same longing for
an assurance of personal immortality which leads so many into that
maze of mingled truth and error, had a great share in disposing his
mind to accept the authoritative doctrine of the Church, which here
as elsewhere answered fully the deepest longings of his soul.

We shall not attempt to follow the chronological order of the journal
with exactness, but in making our extracts shall pursue the order of
topics rather than of time. By the middle of April the question of
the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as
the necessary preliminary to further progress--to be settled in one
way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else
accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his