Five years before his death, in an article in The Catholic World entitled “Luther and the Diet of Worms,” Father Hecker put the case thus:  “It is a misapprehension common among Protestants to suppose that Catholics, in refusing the appeal of Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, condemn the use of reason or individual judgment, or whatever one pleases to call the personal act which involves the exercise of man’s intellect and free will.  The truth is, personal judgment flows from what constitutes man a rational being, and there is no power under heaven that can alienate personal judgment from man, nor can man, if he would, disappropriate it.  The cause of all the trouble at the Diet of Worms was not personal judgment, for neither party put that in question.  The point in dispute was the right application of personal judgment.  Catholics maintained, and always have and always will maintain, that a divine revelation necessitates a divine interpreter.  Catholics resisted, and always will resist, on the ground of its incompetency, a human authority applied to the interpretation of the contents of a divinely-revealed religion.  They consider such an authority, whether of the individual or the state, in religious matters an intrusion.  Catholics insist, without swerving, upon believing in religion none but God. . . .  To investigate and make one’s self certain that God has made a revelation is of obligation, and consistent with Christianity.  But as a divine revelation springs from a source above the sphere of reason, it necessitates a divinely authorized and divinely assisted interpreter and teacher.  This is one of the essential functions of the Church.”

That the use of the Scriptures is not, and cannot be made the ordinary means for making all men Christians, was plain to Isaac Hecker for other reasons than the essential one thus clearly stated.  For, if such were the case, God would bestow on all men the gift to read at sight, or cause all to learn how to read, or would have recorded in the Book itself the words, “Unless a man reads the Bible, and believes what he reads, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,” or their plain equivalent; whereas the Bible, as we have it now, did not exist in the apostolic days, the most glorious era of the Christian Church.  Such is Father Hecker’s argument in a powerful article in The Catholic World for October, 1883.  He continues: 

“But suppose that everybody knew how to read, or all men were gifted to read at first sight; suppose that everybody had a copy of the Bible within his reach, a genuine Bible, and knew with certitude what it means; suppose that Christ himself had laid it down as a rule that the Bible, without note or comment, and as interpreted by each one for himself, is the ordinary way of receiving the grace of salvation—­which is the vital principle of Protestantism; suppose all these evident assumptions as true.  Would the Bible even in that case suffice to make any one man, woman,