It is in this light that we must view the precocious efforts of the young politician. Nothing was further from his thoughts at any time than to employ politics as a means to any private end. Although we have already quoted him as saying that he always felt bound to demand some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature--a Stoic, not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of Father Hecker's interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even here without explaining that we use the word ascetic in its proper sense, to connote the rightful dominance of reason over appetite, the supremacy of the higher over the lower; not the jurisdiction of the judge over the criminal. In his case, during the greater part of his life, the adjustment of the higher and lower, the restraint he placed upon the beast in view of the elevation due to the man, was neither conceived nor felt as punitive. We shall see later on how God finally subjected him to a discipline so corrective as to be acknowledged by him as judicial.
Isaac Hecker threw himself into public questions, then, because, being a workman, he believed he saw ways by which the working classes might be morally and socially elevated. He wanted for his class what he wanted for himself. To get his views into shape, to press them with all his force whenever and wherever an opportunity presented itself, was for him the inescapable consequence of that belief. Like his great patron, St. Paul, "What wilt Thou have me to do?" was always his first question after his own illumination had been granted. There is a note in the collection of private memoranda that has been preserved, in which, alluding to the painful struggles which preceded his clear recognition that the doctrines of the Catholic Church afforded the adequate solution of all his difficulties, he says that his interior sufferings were so great that the question with him was "whether I should drown myself in the river or drown my longings and doubts in a career of wild ambition." Still, to those who knew him well, it is impossible to think of him as ever capable of any ambition which had not an end commensurate with mankind itself. To elevate men, to go up with them, not above them, was, from first to last, the scope of his desire. The nature of his surroundings in youth, his personal experience of the hardships of the poorer classes, his intercourse with radical socialists, together with the incomplete character of the religious training given him, made him at first look on politics as a possible and probable means to this desirable end. But he was too sensibly impelled by the Divine impulse toward personal perfection, and too inflexibly honest with himself, not to come early to a thorough realization, on one hand of the fact that man cannot, unaided, rise above his natural level, and, on the other, that no conceivable amelioration of merely social conditions could satisfy his aspirations. And if not his, how those of other men?