He whose heart is pure and whose aspirations noble, may be so surrounded by the mists of inherited error and misapprehension that the light of truth fails to penetrate them when it first dawns.

The road is always strait which leads any son of Adam to supernal joy in conscious union with his Creator, even when his will is good and his desire unfeigned.
We shall find, therefore, that Isaac Hecker's struggles were many and painful before he fully recognized and attained the necessary means to the end he craved.

They were characteristic also.

He was looking for the satisfaction of his rational aspirations rather than for the solution of historical problems, although his mind was too clear not to see that the two are inextricably bound up together.

But inasmuch as at the period of which we are writing, which was that of the Oxford Tracts, controversy turned mainly on questions of historical continuity and of Divine warrant in the external revelation of holy Scripture, it follows that he, and such as he, must have taken a lonely and unfrequented road towards the truth.