germs.  Always it is the soul of man which is inspired, the mind of man that is enlightened.  Then the teaching comes as record of the fact and the doctrine; then the institution solidifies about them, a perpetual witness that to many men and ages of men the same message has been handed down by its first recipients and has produced in them its proper results.  The race of such souls has not died out in the Christian Church.  The one truth, spoken once for all by the Incarnate Word, takes on for them new aspects and new tones.  They are the pioneers of great movements.  Nurtured in the Church, their ardor burns away mere conventionalities; born outside the Church, the light she carries is a beacon, and the voice she utters is felt as that of the true Mother.  To adapt once more a pregnant sentence from young Hecker, of the truth of which he was himself an example:  “It is God in them which believes in God.”

But to return to Brownson.  An entry in the journal, made nearly a year later, sums up the total impression which Brownson had made upon his young disciple: 

“June 22, 1845.—­0.  A. B. is here.  He arrived this morning.  Though he is a friend to me, and the most critical periods of my experience have been known to him, and he has frequently given me advice and sympathy, yet he never moves my heart.  He has been of inestimable use to me in my intellectual development.  He is, too, a man of heart.  But he is so strong, and so intellectually active, that all his energy is consumed in thought.  He is an intellectual athlete.  He thinks for a dozen men.  He does not take time to realize in heart for himself.  No man reads or thinks more than he.  But he is greater as a writer than as a person.  There are men who never wrote a line, but whose influence is deeper and more extensive than that of others who have written heavy tomes.

“It is too late for Brownson to give himself to contemplation and interior recollection.  He is a controversialist; a doctor.  The last he will be before long.  Some have wondered why I should have contracted such a friendship for one whom they imagine to be so harsh and dictatorial.  I have not felt this.  His presence does not change me; nor do I find myself where I was not after having met him.  He has not the temperament of a genius, but that of a rhetorician and declaimer.  He arrives at his truths by a regular and consecutive system of logic.  His mind is of a historical more than of a poetical mould.

“As a man, I have never known one so conscientious and self-sacrificing.  This is natural to him.  His love of right is supreme, and the thing he detests most is bad logic.  It makes him peevish and often riles his temper.  He defeats, but will never convince an opponent.  This is bad.  No one loves to break a lance with him, because he cuts such ungentlemanly gashes.  He is strong, and he knows it.  There is more of the Indian chief than of the Christian knight in his composition.  But