The letter last quoted from had not yet been sent when the answer to his announcement of June 11 reached him, and he added a postscript. The only point in it to which he alludes or makes any direct reply is the gentle expression of his mother's disapprobation of his purpose:
"Your letter and draft, brother George, came this morning. You say mother would prefer my joining the Anglican Church. The reasons why she prefers this are such as would doubtless govern me if I did not feel still deeper and stronger reasons to overcome them. . . . My present convictions are deeper far than any I have ever experienced, and are not hastily decided upon."
Turning now to the diary, the entries made at this time seem especially characteristic:
"June 13, 1844.--I feel very cheerful and at ease since I have consented to join the Catholic Church. Never have I felt the quietness, the immovableness, and the permanent rest that I do now. It is inexpressible. I feel that essential and interior permanence which nothing exterior can disturb, and no act which it calls on me to perform will move in the least. It is with a perfect ease and gracefulness that I never dreamed of that I shall unite with the Church. It will not change but fix my life. No external relations, events, or objects can disturb this unreachable quietness or break the deep repose in which I am.
"The exoteric eye is double; the esoteric eye is single.
"The external world is divisional; the internal world is unity.
"The esoteric includes the exoteric, but the exoteric excludes the esoteric.
"The man can move all faculties, organs, limbs; but they cannot move the man.
"The Creator moves the creature, and the creature moves the created.
"We know God by looking towards Him with the single eye.
"To-morrow I go with R. W. Emerson to Harvard to see Lane and Alcott, and shall stay until Sunday. We shall not meet each other, for I can meet him on no other grounds than those of love. We may talk intellectually together, and remark, and reply, and remark again."
We give the reader from the diary the following estimate of a transcendentalist, mainly to serve as a background for the picture which Isaac Hecker drew of his own mind in the succeeding pages: