The lessons to be learned from Father Hecker are mainly those arising from the interaction between God's supernatural dealings with him, and his own natural characteristics.

This fact, moreover, is typical as well as personal, for the great question of his day, which was the dawning of our own, was the relation of the natural man to the regenerating influences of Christianity.

This being so, it is plain to our own mind that no adequate representation of the man could be made without a free use of these early journals.

They seem to us one of the chief Providential results of the spiritual isolation of his youth.

He was in a manner driven to this intimate self-communing, on one hand by his never-satisfied craving for sympathetic companionship, and on the other by his complete unacquaintance with a kind of reading which even at this point might have shed some light upon his interior difficulties.