Both Brownson and himself were men true to their convictions, courageous and unselfish.

They were both firmly determined to have the truth and to have the whole of it, whether spoken _ex cathedra_ in the divine court of the innermost soul, or _ex cathedra_ by the supreme authority of God in the organism of the Christian Church.

"Brownson was firmly persuaded," says Father Hecker, "and so am I, that the great fault of men generally is that they deem the life of their souls, thoughts, judgments, and convictions, yearnings, aspirations, and longings to be too subject to illusion to be worthy their attentive study and manly fidelity; that even multitudes of Catholics greatly undervalue the divine reality of their inner life, whether in the natural or supernatural order." The philosophical difficulty was far less serious than the spiritual one.

To the philosopher the fundamental truths of human reason are established as objective realities by processes common to every sane mind, and are backed by the common consent of men; and this is true also of the prime verities of ethics.

But when a man finds himself subject to secret influences of the utmost power over him, able to cast him off or to hold him, to sicken his body and distress his soul, extending his views of the truth by flashes of light into vistas that seem infinite, making his love of right an ecstasy, his sympathy for human misery a passion, controlling his diet and his clothing, ordering him here and there at will and knowing how to be obeyed--when, in a word, a man finds himself treated by God in a manner totally different from any one else he knows or ever heard of, it is plain that he must agonize for the possession of a divine sanction to which he can appeal in common with all men, and which must therefore exist in the external order.