These things he knew by actual contact, by physical, mental, and moral experience, as a man knows by touch and taste and smell.

Men's sufferings, longings, struggles, disappointments had been early thrust upon him as a personal and most weighty burden; and the only relief yet offered was the Christ of emotional Methodism.

To a nature more open to temptation on its lower side, and hence more conscious of its radical limitations, even this defective presentation of the Redeemer of men might have appealed profoundly.

But Isaac Hecker's problems were at this time mainly social; as, indeed, to use the word in a large sense, they remained until the end.

Now, Protestantism is essentially unsocial, being an extravagant form of individualism.