Questions of the Soul

The book is organised around the questions Hecker takes to be actually pressing on his contemporaries — the demands of the soul that neither material progress nor private religious sentiment can satisfy — rather than around the standard apologetic topics of evidence and miracle.

Its distinguishing move is the appeal to experience. Hecker had lived in the communities that promised a new spiritual order and found them insufficient, and he writes as someone reporting on the search rather than lecturing from the far side of it. He argues that what the seeker is after is precisely what the church claims to supply — an objective, authoritative and sacramental answer rather than a better sentiment.

The later chapters make the direct Catholic case, including the claim of authority, in terms aimed at an American Protestant and post-Protestant readership. It was written in 1855, at the height of anti-Catholic feeling in the United States, which makes its confidence about the American future notable.

Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819–1888) was born in New York City to German immigrant parents and worked in the family bakery. Drawn into the reform and Transcendentalist ferment of the 1840s, he spent time at Brook Farm and at Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands, and knew Emerson, Thoreau and Orestes Brownson.

He was received into the Catholic Church in 1844, ordained a Redemptorist, and dismissed from that order in 1857 after travelling to Rome to press his case for an English-speaking American mission. Pius IX released him from his vows and he founded the Paulist Fathers, the first American congregation of priests, which he led until his death.