It opens with a prayer for light and direction, which is its dedication to the uses not only of an earnest but a religious seeker.

He addresses himself directly to God as Father, not making either appeal or reference to our Lord.

But there is in it an invocation to those "that are in heaven to intercede and plead" for him, which recalls the fact, so often mentioned by him, that it was the teaching of the Catechism of the Council of Trent on the Communion of Saints which cleared away his final clouds and brought him directly to the Church.

There is a note, too, among his later papers, in which, speaking of the phenomena of modern spiritualism, he says that the same longing for an assurance of personal immortality which leads so many into that maze of mingled truth and error, had a great share in disposing his mind to accept the authoritative doctrine of the Church, which here as elsewhere answered fully the deepest longings of his soul.
We shall not attempt to follow the chronological order of the journal with exactness, but in making our extracts shall pursue the order of topics rather than of time.

By the middle of April the question of the Church had presented itself so unmistakably to Isaac Hecker, as the necessary preliminary to further progress--to be settled in one way or another, either set definitely aside as unessential or else accepted as the adequate solution of man's problems, that his struggles for and against it recur with especial frequency.