All was found to be as stated above.

Brownson's ripe experience and my own thoroughly earnest investigation tallied perfectly.

Indeed, the more you examine the Protestant sects in the light of first principles the more they are found to weaken human certitude, interfere with reason's native knowledge of God and His attributes, and perplex the free working of the laws of human thought.

Protestantism is no religion for a philosopher, unless he is a pessimist--if you can call such a being a philosopher--and adopts Calvinism." Why Calvinism, with its dread consistency of aversion for human nature, did not attract him in these early inquiries was expressed by Father Hecker in after years by the saying, "Heresy always involves a mutilation of man's natural reason." The typical Calvinist foams against man's natural capacity for the true and the good, and one of its representatives, a Presbyterian minister, had the consistency to say to our young disciple of nature, "Unless you believe that you are totally depraved you will certainly suffer eternal damnation." These words were spoken to one who felt some sort of apostleship growing into act within his bosom: to preach the Gospel to those who are totally depraved he perceived to be both vain and suicidal.
Furthermore, the consciousness of his own upright character, his experience and observation of human virtue in others, made abstract arguments needless to prove that Calvinism is an outrage on human kind and a blasphemy against the Creator.
Anglicanism, too--uncleansed, as it notoriously is, of a Calvinistic taint, broken up by absolute license of dissent, maintaining a mere outward conformity to an extremely lax discipline--affronted Isaac Hecker's ideal of the communion of man and God; man seeking and God giving the one only revelation of divine truth, unifying and organizing the Christian community: and this in spite of an attraction for the beauty of the Episcopal service which he often confesses in his diary.
In the same scrupulous spirit he tried the Baptists, though he must have known that they were, almost without exception, Calvinists.

He had a conference with one of their ministers which, from the account he gives of it, must have degenerated into something like a wrangle.
"If," said young Hecker, "you admit that baptism is not a saving ordinance, why, then, do you separate yourselves from the rest of Christendom on a mere question of ceremonial observance ?" There could be no satisfactory answer to this question.
As to the Methodists, they made fifty years ago much less pretension to an intellectual footing in the religious world than at the present day.