the field of the really knowable?  Some will admit that religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness, affirming, however, the subjectivity of all purely spiritual life; and no more can be said, they insist, for the principles, metaphysical and logical, with which they are associated in the spiritual life of man.  Now, such a theory never leaves the soul that is governed by reason at rest.  The problem ever and again demands solution:  are these yearnings, aspirations, unappeased desires, or religious feelings—­the ruling traits of the noblest men and women—­are they genuine, real, corresponding to and arising from the reality of certain objects external to the soul?  I think that in the solution of this problem Dr. Brownson fought and won his greatest victory; at any rate, it was to me the most interesting period of his life.  No wonder, since I had the same battle to fight myself, and it was just at this epoch that I came into closest contact with him.  We fought this battle shoulder-to-shoulder.”—­Catholic World, October, 1887, pp. 5-6.

Brownson’s heavy heart was due to philosophical difficulties, and Isaac Hecker’s to the same; but in addition the latter had a mystical experience to which Brownson was at that time, certainly, a stranger, and, as far as we know, he remained so; and these mystical difficulties demanded settlement far more imperatively than did the philosophical ones.  Isaac Hecker’s inner life must have an external adjunct of divine authority.  Such aspirations of the soul for present union with God in love as he had, are more peremptory in demanding satisfaction than those of the logical faculty in demanding the ascertainment of the certain truth.  Philosophy outside the Church is to the searcher after truth what St. Paul said the Law was to the Jews, a schoolmaster; but, to a soul in the condition of Isaac Hecker, the Holy Spirit is a spouse demanding union.  Both Brownson and himself were men true to their convictions, courageous and unselfish.  They were both firmly determined to have the truth and to have the whole of it, whether spoken ex cathedra in the divine court of the innermost soul, or ex cathedra by the supreme authority of God in the organism of the Christian Church.  “Brownson was firmly persuaded,” says Father Hecker, “and so am I, that the great fault of men generally is that they deem the life of their souls, thoughts, judgments, and convictions, yearnings, aspirations, and longings to be too subject to illusion to be worthy their attentive study and manly fidelity; that even multitudes of Catholics greatly undervalue the divine reality of their inner life, whether in the natural or supernatural order.”