"There are some for whom the predominant influence is the external one, authority, example, precept, and the like. Others in whose lives the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates. In my case, from my childhood God influenced me by an interior light and by the interior touch of His Holy Spirit."
"While I was a youth, and in early manhood, I was preserved from certain sins and certain occasions of sin, in a way that was peculiar and remarkable. I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the time, conscious that God was preserving me innocent with a view to some future providence. Mind, all this was long before I came into the church."
"Many a time before my conversion God gave me grace to weep over those words: 'And all those who love His coming.' I did not believe in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to believe it. I had learned much of the Bible from my mother and had read it often and much myself."
This consciously supernatural character of his inner life from the first, should be kept closely united in the reader's mind with that other idea of his adhesion to "guileless nature" which was such a favorite theme with Father Hecker. No one could be more emphatic than he in asserting the necessity of the supernatural for the attainment of man's destiny. How could it be otherwise, when he considered that destiny to be the elevation of man above all good merely human, and by means far beyond the compass of his natural powers? Still, this was undoubtedly a conclusion of his riper years, a result arrived at after a certain intense if not very prolonged experience in contemporary Utopias, in futile endeavors to raise man above his own level while remaining on it, whether by socialistic schemes or social politics.
In an article called "Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," published in _The Catholic World_ of May, 1887, Father Hecker has himself made some interesting references to his experiences in the latter field, and upon these we shall draw heavily for our own account of this period of his life, supplementing them with whatever bears upon the subject in the memoranda already referred to.
Concerning the inception of this party, to which all three of the young Heckers belonged in 1834, we have a better statement in Dr. Brownson's _Convert_ than we know of elsewhere. Brownson was for a time actively interested in it, and in 1829 established a journal in support of its principles somewhere in Western New York. From him we learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L. Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting control of political power so as to use it for establishing purely secular schools. Their advocacy of anti-Christian and free-love doctrines had so signally failed among adult Americans that the slower but surer method of educating the children of the country without religion had dawned upon them as more certain to succeed.