It is possible that we have readers who may deem us too copious in our quotations from this source. But, if wearisome to any, yet they are necessary to those for whom this Life is especially written. The lessons to be learned from Father Hecker are mainly those arising from the interaction between God's supernatural dealings with him, and his own natural characteristics. This fact, moreover, is typical as well as personal, for the great question of his day, which was the dawning of our own, was the relation of the natural man to the regenerating influences of Christianity. This being so, it is plain to our own mind that no adequate representation of the man could be made without a free use of these early journals. They seem to us one of the chief Providential results of the spiritual isolation of his youth. He was in a manner driven to this intimate self-communing, on one hand by his never-satisfied craving for sympathetic companionship, and on the other by his complete unacquaintance with a kind of reading which even at this point might have shed some light upon his interior difficulties. In later years he enjoyed, in the study of accredited Christian mystics, that kind of satisfaction which a traveller experiences who, after long wanderings in what had seemed a trackless desert, obtains a map which not only makes his whole route plain, but assures him that he did not stray from well-known paths even during his times of most extreme bewilderment.
That the diary has the character we here claim for it, and is not the mere ordinary result of a morbid and aimless introspection, is plainly shown by the speedy cessation of excessive self-analysis on Father Hecker's part, after he had actually reached the goal to which he was at this period alternately sweetly led and violently driven. But it is also shown by the deep humility which is revealed precisely by this sharp probing of his interior. Though he felt himself in touch with God in some special way, yet it was with so little pride that it was his profound conviction, as it remained, indeed, throughout his life, that what he had all had or might have. But the study of his interior thus forced upon him was far from a pleasing task. "It is exceedingly oppressive to me to write as I now do," we find him complaining; "continually does myself appear in my writing. I would that my I were wholly lost in the sea of the Spirit--wholly lost in God."