Those of our readers who are either versed in mystical theology or who have any wide knowledge of the lives of the Church's more interior saints, with neither of which Isaac Hecker had at this time any acquaintance, will be apt to recall here St. Francis of Assisi and his bride, the Lady Poverty, the similar occurrences related by Henry Suso of himself, and the mystic espousals of St. Catharine. We have in this relation not only the plainly avowed reason why he accepted the celibate life, even before entering the Church or arriving at any clear understanding of his duty to do so, but we have something more. Not yet certain of his own vocation, the dream of a virginal apostolate, including the two sexes, had already absorbed his yearnings, never again to be forgotten. Neither priest nor Catholic, save in the as yet unrevealed ordinance of God, he was no longer free to invite any woman to marriage, no matter how deeply he might be sensible of her feminine attraction. The union of souls? Yes; for uses worthy of souls. The union of bodies? No; that would only clip his wings and narrow his horizon. Thenceforward the test of true kinship with him could only be a kindred aspiration after union in liberty from merely natural trammels, in order to tend more surely to a supernatural end.
This may seem to some a strange beginning to a life so simply and entirely set apart from the active, or, at least, public union of the sexes in apostolic labors. Strange or not, the reader will see it to be more true as this biography proceeds, and its writer is not conscious of any reluctance to make it known. Such an integral supernatural mission to men was what he ever after desired and sought to establish, though he only attained success on the male side. We cannot deny that this diary, surprising to us in many ways, was most so in this particular, although in this particular we found the explanation of many words spoken by Father Hecker in his maturity and old age, words the most sober and the most decided we ever heard from him. He never for an hour left out of view the need of women for any great work of religion, though he doubtless made very sure of his auditor before unveiling his whole thought. He never made so much as a serious attempt to incorporate women with his work, but he never ceased to look around and to plan with a view to doing so. Among the personal memoranda already mentioned are found evidences of this so direct, and corroborated by such recent facts, that they cannot be used until the lapse of time shall have made an extension of this life as well possible as necessary.
