“Don’t you think we might have a memorial tablet to Dr. Brownson in our church?”

“Yes!  Of all the men I ever knew, he had most influence over me.”

“When you were in early life?”

“Yes, of course.  Oh! in after life no man has had influence with me, but only God.”

This meant, of course, the influence of master upon disciple, and not that of lawful authority or of fraternal love, to both of which Father Hecker was ever very sensitive.

Speaking at another time of Brownson, he quoted this sentence from The Convert as so perfect an epitome of the man that it should be put on his monument: 

“I had one principle, and only one, to which, since throwing up Universalism, I had been faithful; a principle to which I had, perhaps, made some sacrifices—­that of following my own honest convictions whithersoever they should lead me.”

And just here is found one of those points of essential difference which it is interesting to note between these two men, so closely drawn together by Divine Providence at one period, and in such a relation that to the elder the function of guidance seemed to have been appointed.  In unswerving fidelity to conviction they were on a par, but in native clearness of vision and instinctive aversion from error they were far less closely matched.  Brownson in early life had tried, accepted, and preached various forms of aberration from true doctrine.  One might say of him, that, having found himself outside the highway at his start, he gathered accretions from hedge and ditch as he struggled toward the true road, and went through an after process of sloughing them one by one.  Perhaps that process ended in making him over-timid.  It was otherwise with Isaac Hecker.  He, too, had stopped to consider many doctrines which purported to be true; more than that, he had recognized in each the modicum of truth which it possessed.  But the falsity with which this was overloaded was powerful enough to repel him, in spite of the truth he knew to be contained in it.  He carried in himself the touchstone to which all that was akin to it beyond him responded of necessity.  The Light which lights every man who comes into the world had not only never been darkened in him by sinful courses, but it seemed to burn with a crystal clearness which threw up into hideous and repellant proportions all that was offensive to it.  Many voices had called him from without, but he had refused obedience unto any.  He never submitted until his submission was full and not to be withdrawn.  So, once in the Church, and enjoying her divine guarantee of external authority, he had few if any disquieting recollections of error to breed distrust of the light that shone within him.  His soul was of that order to which truth speaks authoritatively and at first hand; of that soil from which institutions which are to stand spring by a true process of development, because it is the soil which first received their