CHAPTER IX

Restoration of Morwenstow Church—The Shingle Roof—The First Ruridecanal Synod—The Weekly Offertory—Correspondence with Mr. Walter—On Alms—Harvest Thanksgiving—The School—Mr. Hawker belonged to no Party—His Eastern Proclivities—Theological Ideas—Baptism—Original Sin—His Preaching—Some Sermons.

Thechurch of Morwenstow was restored by Mr. Hawker in 1849; that is to say, he removed the pews that had been built about the old carved oak benches, pulled down the gallery, and put up a new pulpit, and made sundry other changes in the church.

The roof was covered with oak shingle in the most deplorable condition of decay. According to the description of a mason who went up the tower to survey it, “it looked, for all the world, like a wrecked ship thrown up on the shore.”

Mr. Hawker was very anxious to have the roof reshingled, and this question was before the vestry during several years. The parish offered to give the church a roofing of the best Delabole slate, but the vicar stood out for shingle. The rate-payers protested against wasting their money on such a perishable material, but the vicar would not yield.

Vestry meeting after vestry meeting was called on this matter; one of the landowners remonstrated, but all in vain: Mr. Hawker remained unmoved; a shingle roof he would have, or none at all. A gentleman wrote to him, quoting a passage from Parker’sGlossary of Architectureto show that anciently shingle roofs were put on only because more durable material was not available, and were removed when lead, slate or tiles were to be had. But Mr. Hawker remained unconvinced. “Our parson du stick to his maygaims,” said the people shrugging their shoulders. He was very angry with the opposition to his shingle roof, and quarrelled with several of his parishioners about it.

He managed to collect money among his friends, and re-roofed the church, bit by bit, with oak shingle. But old shingle was made from heart of oak cut down in winter: the shingle he obtained was from oak cut in spring for barking, and therefore full of sap. The consequence was, that in a very few years it rotted, and let the water in as through a colander.

Enough money was thrown away on this roof to have put the whole church in thorough repair.

I pointed out to the vicar some years ago, when he was talking of repairing his church, that the stones in the arches and in the walls were of various sorts—some good building-stones, some rotten, some dark, some light—giving a patchwork appearance to the interior. I advised the removal of the poorer stones, and the insertion of better ones for the sake of uniformity. “No, never!” he answered. “The Church is built up of good and bad, of the feeble and the strong, the rich and the poor, the durable and the perishable. The material Church is a type of the Catholic Church, not the type of a sect.”

In many ways Mr. Hawker was before his time, as in other ways he was centuries behind it.

He was the first to reinstitute ruridecanal synods which had fallen into disuse in Cornwall; and, when he was rural dean in 1844, he issued the following citation to all the clergy of the deanery of Trigg-Major:—

In obedience to the desire of many of the clergy, and with the full sanction of our Right Reverend Father in God, the lord bishop of this diocese, I propose, in these anxious days of the ecclesiate, to restore the ancient usage of rural synods in the deanery of Trigg-Major. I accordingly convene you to appear, in your surplice, in my church of Morwenstow on the fifth day of March next ensuing, at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, then and there, after divine service, to deliberate with your brethren in chapter assembled. I remain, reverend sir, your faithful servant,

R. S. Hawker,

The Rural Dean.

February, 1844.

Accordingly on 5th March, the clergy assembled in the vicarage, and walked in procession thence to the church in their surplices. The church was filled with the laity; the clergy were seated in the chancel. The altar was adorned with flowers and lighted candles. After service the laity withdrew, and the doors of the church were closed. The clergy then assembled in the nave, and the rural dean read them an elaborate and able statement of the case of rural chapters, after which they proceeded to business. His paper on Rural Synods was afterwards published by Edwards & Hughes, Ave Maria Lane, 1844.

It is remarkable that synods, which are now everywhere revived throughout the Church of England, meeting sometimes in vestries, sometimes in dining-rooms, were first restored, after the desuetude of three centuries, in the church of Morwenstow, and with so much gravity and dignity, over fifty years ago.

The importance of the weekly offertory is another thing now recognised. The Church seems to be preparing herself against possible disestablishment and disendowment, by reviving her organic life in synods, and by impressing on her people the necessity of giving towards the support of the services and the ministry. But the weekly offertory is quite a novelty in most places still. Almost the first incumbent in England to establish it was the vicar of Morwenstow, before 1843.

He entered into controversy on the subject of the offertory with Mr. Walter ofThe Times.

When the Poor Law Amendment Bill passed in 1834, and was amended in 1836 and 1838, it was thought by many that the need for an offertory in church was done away with, and that the giving of alms to the poor was an interference with the working of the Poor Law.

Mr. Hawker published a statement of what he did in this matter inThe English Churchman, for 1844. Mr. Walter made this statement the basis of an attack on the system, and especially on Mr. Hawker, in a letter toThe Times.

Mr. Hawker replied to this:—

Sir,—I regret to discover that you have permitted yourself to invade the tranquillity of my parish, and to endeavour to interrupt the harmony between myself and my parishioners, in a letter which I have just read in a recent number ofThe Times. You have done so by a garbled copy of a statement which appeared inThe English Churchman, of the reception and disposal of the offertory alms in the parish church of Morwenstow.

I say “garbled” because, while you have adduced just so much of the document as suited your purpose, you have suppressed such parts of it as might have tended to alleviate the hostility which many persons entertain to this part of the service of the Church.

With reference to our choice, as the recipients of Church money, of labourers whose “wages are seven shillings a week,” and “who have a wife and four children to maintain thereon,” you say, “Here is an excuse for the employer to give deficient wages!”

In reply to this, I beg to inform you that the wages in this neighbourhood never fluctuate: they have continued at this fixed amount during the ten years of my incumbency.... Your argument, as applied to my parishioners, is this: Because they have scanty wages in that county, therefore they should have no alms; because these labourers of Morwenstow are restricted by the law from any relief from the rate, therefore they shall have no charity from the Church; because they have little, therefore they shall have no more. You insinuate that I, a Christian minister, think eight shillings a week sufficient for six persons during a winter’s week, as though I were desirous to limit the resources of my poor parishioners to that sum. May God forgive you your miserable supposition! I have all my life sincerely, and not to serve any party purpose, been an advocate of the cause of the poor. I, for many long years, have honestly, and not to promote political ends, denounced the unholy and cruel enactments of the New Poor Law....

Let me now proceed to correct some transcendent misconceptions of yourself and others as to the nature and intent of the offertory in church. The ancient and modern division of all religious life was, and is, threefold—into devotion, self-denial and alms. No sacred practice, no Christian service, was or is complete without the union of these three. They were all alike and equally enjoined by the Saviour of man. The collection of alms was therefore incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer. But it was never held to be established among the services of the Church for the benefit of the poor alone: it was to enable the rich to enjoy the blessedness of almsgiving for their Redeemer’s sake: it was to afford to every giver fixed and solemn opportunity to fulfil the remembrance, that whatsoever they did to the poor they did unto Him, and that the least of such their kindness would not be forgotten at the last day. “Let us wash,” they said, “our Saviour’s feet by alms”.... But this practice of alms, whereunto the heavenly Head of the Church annexed a specific reward—this necessity, we are told, is become obsolete. A Christian duty become, by desuetude, obsolete! As well might a man infer that any other religious excellence ceased to be obligatory because it had been disused. The virtue of humility, for example, which has been so long in abeyance among certain of the laity, shall no longer, therefore, be a Christian grace! The blessing on the meek shall cease in 1844! ... Voluntary kindness and alms have been rendered unnecessary by the compulsory payments enacted by the New Poor Law! As though the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew had been repealed by Sir James Graham! As if one of the three conditions of our Christian covenant was to expire during the administration of Sir Robert Peel!...

And now, sir, I conclude with one or two parting admonitions to yourself. You are, I am told, an elderly man, fast approaching the end of all things, and, ere many years have passed, about to stand a separated soul among the awful mysteries of the spiritual world. I counsel you to beware, lest the remembrance of these attempts to diminish the pence of the poor, and to impede the charitable duties of the rich, should assuage your happiness in that abode where the strifes and the triumphs of controversy are unknown, “Because thou hast done this thing, and because thou hadst no pity”. And lastly, I advise you not again to assail our rural parishes with such publications, to harass and unsettle the minds of our faithful people. We, the Cornish clergy, are a humble and undistinguished race; but we are apt, when unjustly assailed, to defend ourselves in straightforward language, and to utter plain admonitions, such as, on this occasion, I have thought it my duty to address to yourself; and I remain your obedient servant,

R. S. Hawker.

Nov.27, 1844.

Now there is scarcely a church in England in which a harvest thanksgiving service is not held. But probably the first to institute such a festival in the Anglican Church was the vicar of Morwenstow in 1843.

In that year he issued a notice to his parishioners to draw their attention to the duty of thanking God for the harvest, and of announcing that he would set apart a Sunday for such a purpose.

To the Parishioners of Morwenstow.

When the sacred Psalmist inquired what he should render unto the Lord for all the benefits that He had done unto him, he made answer to himself, and said: “I will receive the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord”. Brethren, God has been very merciful to us this year also. He hath filled our garners with increase, and satisfied our poor with bread. He opened His hand, and filled all things living with plenteousness. Let us offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving among such as keep Holy Day. Let us gather together in the chancel of our church on the first Sunday of the next month, and there receive, in the bread of the new corn,[38]that blessed sacrament which was ordained to strengthen and refresh our souls. As it is written, “He rained down manna also upon them for to eat, and gave them food from heaven.” And again, “In the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red.” Furthermore, let us remember, that, as a multitude of grains of wheat are mingled into one loaf, so we, being many, are intended to be joined together into one, in that holy sacrament of the Church of Jesus Christ. Brethren, on the first morning of October call to mind the word, that, wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together. “Let the people praise thee, O God, yea, let all the people praise thee! Then shall the earth bring forth her increase, and God, even our own God, shall give us His blessing. God shall bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him.”

The Vicar.

The Vicarage, Morwenstow, Sept. 13, 1843.

At much expense to himself he built and maintained a school in a central position in the parish. He called it St. Mark’s School. It stands on a very exposed spot, and the site can hardly be considered as judiciously chosen. It is unnecessary here, it could hardly prove interesting, to quote numberless letters which I have before me, recounting his struggles to keep this school open, and obtain an efficient master for it. It was a great tax on his means, lightened, however, by the donations and subscriptions of landowners in the parish and personal friends towards the close of his life.

But in 1857 he wrote a letter to a friend, who has sent the letter toThe Rock, from which I extract it.

It is said that Mr. Hawker is a very “eccentric” man. Now, I know not in what sense they may have intended the phrase, nor, in fact, what they wish to insinuate; so that I can hardly reply. If they mean to convey the ordinary force of the term, namely, a person out of the common, I am again at a loss. I wear a cassock, instead of a broadcloth coat, which is, I know, eccentric; but then, I have paid my parish school expenses for many years out of the difference between the usual clergyman’s tailor’s bill and my own cost in apparel; so that I do not, as they may have meant, feel ashamed or blush at such eccentricity. My mode of life, again, does differ from that of most of my clerical neighbours; for while they belong, some to one party in the Church and some to another, I have always lived aloof from them all, whether High or Low. And although there exist clerical clubs of both extremes in this deanery, and I have been invited to join by each, I never yet was present at a club meeting, dinner or a local synod. The time would fail me to recount the many modes and manners wherein I do differ from usual men. Be it enough that I am neither ashamed nor sorry for any domestic or parochial habit of life.

In 1845 he issued the following curious notice in reference to his daily prayer and his school:—

Take Notice.

The vicar will say Divine service henceforward every morning at ten and every evening at four. “Praised be the Lorddaily, even the God that helpeth us, and poureth His benefits upon us” (Ps. lxviii. 19).

The vicar will attend at St. Mark’s schoolroom every Friday at three o’clock, to catechise the scholars, and at the Sunday school at the usual hour. He will not from henceforth show the same kindness to those who keep back their children from school as he will to those who send them. “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Exod. xxiii. 19).

Mr. Hawker was a High Churchman, but one of an original type, wholly distinct from the Tractarian of the first period, and the Ritualist of the second period, of the Catholic revival in the English Church. He never associated himself with any party. He did not read the controversial literature of his day, or interest himself in the persons of the ecclesiastical movement in the Anglican communion.

In November, 1861, he wrote:—

Dr. Bloxham was an ancient friend of mine (at Oxford). One of a large body of good and learned men, all now gone, and he only left. How I recollect their faces and words! Newman, Pusey, Ward, Marriott—they used to be all in the common-room every evening, discussing, talking, reading. I remember the one to whom I did not take was Dr. Pusey. He never seemed simple in thought or speech; obscure and involved. He was the last in all that set—as I now look back and think—to have followers called by his name.

Mr. Hawker turned his eyes far more towards the Eastern Church than towards Rome. His mind was fired by Mr. Collins-Trelawney’sPeranzabuloe or the Lost Church Found, the fourth edition of which appeared in 1839. It was an account of the ancient British chapel and cell of St. Piran, which had been swallowed up by the sands, but which was exhumed, and the bones of the saint, some ancient crosses, and early rude sculpture found. The author of the book drew a picture of the ancient British Church independent of Rome, having its own local peculiarities with regard to the observance of Easter, and the tonsure, etc., and argued that this church, which held aloof from St. Augustine, was of Oriental origin. He misunderstood the paschal question altogether, and his argument on that head falls to the ground when examined by the light which can be brought to bear on it from Irish sources. The ancient British, Scottish and Irish churches did not follow the Oriental rule with regard to the observance of Easter; but their calendar had got out of gear, and they objected to its revision.

However, the book convinced Mr. Hawker that he must look to the East for the ancestors of the Cornish Church, and not Rome-wards; and this view of the case lasted through his life, and coloured his opinions.

When Dr. J. Mason Neale’sHistory of the Holy Eastern Churchcame out, he was intensely interested in it; and his Oriental fever reached its climax, and manifested itself in the adoption of a pink brimless hat, after the Eastern type. This Eastern craze also probably induced him, when he adopted a vestment, to put on a cope for the celebration of the holy communion; that vestment being used by the Armenian Church for the Divine Mysteries, whereas it isneverso used in the Roman Church.

His theology assumed an Oriental tinge, and he expressed his views more as an Eastern than as a son of the West.

A few of his short notes of exposition on Holy Scripture have come into my hands, and I insert one or two of them as specimens of the poetical fancy which played round Gospel truths.

Ὁ μεσίτης. A mediator is not one who prays. Christ’s manhood is the intermediate thing which stands between the Trinity and man, to link and blend the natures human and Divine. It is the bridge between the place of exile and our native land. The presence of God the Son, standing with his wounds on the right hand of God the Fatheris, and constitutes, mediation.

His idea is that mediation is not intercession, but the serving as a channel of intercommunion between God and man. Thus there can be but one mediator, but every one may intercede for another. There can be no doubt that he was right.

His views with regard to baptism were peculiar. He seems to have retained a little of his grandfather’s Calvinistic leaven in his soul, much as St. Augustine’s early Manichæism clung to him, and discoloured his later orthodoxy. The Catholic doctrine of the Fall is, that, by the first transgression of Adam, a discord entered into his constitution, so that thenceforth, soul and mind and body, instead of desiring what is good and salutary, are distracted by conflicting wishes, the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the mind approving that which is repugnant to the body. The object of the Incarnation is to restore harmony to the nature of man; and in baptism is infused into man a supernatural element of power for conciliating the three constituents of man. Fallen man is, according to Tridentine doctrine, a beautiful instrument whose strings are in discord; a chime

Of sweet bells jangled, out of tune.

But he is provided with the Conciliator, with One whose note is so clear and true that he can raise the pitch of all his strings by that, and thus restore the lost music of the world.

Lutheran and Calvinistic teaching, however, are the reverse of this. According to the language of the “Formulary of Concord,” man by the Fall has lost every element of good, even the smallest capacity and aptitude and power in spiritual things; he has lost the faculty of knowing God, and the will to do anything that is good; he can no more lead a good life than a stock or a stone; everything good in him is utterly obliterated. There is also a positive ingredient of sin infused into the veins of every man. Sin is, according to Luther, of the essence of man, Original sin is not, as the Church teaches, the loss of supernatural grace co-ordinating man’s faculties, and their consequent disorder; it is something born of the father and mother. The clay of which we are formed is damnable; the fœtus in the mother’s womb is sin; man, with his whole nature and essence, is not only a sinner, but sin. Such are the expressions of Luther, indorsed by Carlstadt. Man, according to Catholic theology, still bears in him the image of God, but blurred. According to Melancthon, this image is wholly obliterated by an “intimate, most evil, most profound, inscrutable, ineffable corruption of our whole nature.” Calvin clinches the matter by observing that from man’s corrupted nature comes only what is damnable. “Man,” says he, “has been so banished from the kingdom of God, that all in him that bears reference to the blessed life of the soul is extinct.”[39]And if men have glimpses of better things, it is only that God may take from them every excuse when he damns them.[40]

Mr. Hawker by no means adopted the Catholic view of the Fall: the Protestant doctrine of the utter corruption and ruin of man’s nature had been so deeply driven into his mind by his grandfather, that it never wholly worked itself out, and he never attained to the healthier view of human nature as a compound of good elements temporarily thrown in disarray.

This view of his appears in papers which are under my eye, as I write, and in his ballad for a cottage-wall, on Baptism.

Ah! woe is me! for I have no graceNor goodness as I ought:I never shall go to the happy place,And ’tis all my parents’ fault.

Ah! woe is me! for I have no grace

Nor goodness as I ought:

I never shall go to the happy place,

And ’tis all my parents’ fault.

His teaching on the Eucharist he embodied in a ballad entitled “Ephphatha”. An old blind man sits in a hall at Morwenstow, that of Tonacombe probably.

He asks, and bread of wheat they bring;He thirsts for water from the springWhich flowed of old, and still flows on,With name and memory of St. John.

He asks, and bread of wheat they bring;

He thirsts for water from the spring

Which flowed of old, and still flows on,

With name and memory of St. John.

Bread and water are given him; and, through the stained windows, glorious rainbow tints fall over what is set before him. A page looking on him pities the old man, because—

He eats, but sees not on that breadWhat glorious radiance there is shed;He drinks from out that chalice fair,Nor marks the sunlight glancing there.Watch! gentle Ronald, watch and pray!And hear once more an old man’s lay:I cannot see the morning pouredRuddy and rich on this gay board;I may not trace the noonday lightWherewith my bread and bowl are bright;But thou, whose words are sooth, hast saidThat brightness falls on this fair bread;Thou sayest, and thy tones are true,This cup is tinged with heaven’s own hue:I trust thy voice, I know from theeThat which I cannot hear nor see.

He eats, but sees not on that breadWhat glorious radiance there is shed;He drinks from out that chalice fair,Nor marks the sunlight glancing there.

He eats, but sees not on that bread

What glorious radiance there is shed;

He drinks from out that chalice fair,

Nor marks the sunlight glancing there.

Watch! gentle Ronald, watch and pray!And hear once more an old man’s lay:I cannot see the morning pouredRuddy and rich on this gay board;I may not trace the noonday lightWherewith my bread and bowl are bright;But thou, whose words are sooth, hast saidThat brightness falls on this fair bread;Thou sayest, and thy tones are true,This cup is tinged with heaven’s own hue:I trust thy voice, I know from theeThat which I cannot hear nor see.

Watch! gentle Ronald, watch and pray!

And hear once more an old man’s lay:

I cannot see the morning poured

Ruddy and rich on this gay board;

I may not trace the noonday light

Wherewith my bread and bowl are bright;

But thou, whose words are sooth, hast said

That brightness falls on this fair bread;

Thou sayest, and thy tones are true,

This cup is tinged with heaven’s own hue:

I trust thy voice, I know from thee

That which I cannot hear nor see.

The application of the parable is palpable. Mr. Hawker appended to the ballad the following note:—

I have sought in these verses to suggest a shadow of that beautiful instruction to Christian men, the actual and spiritual presence of our Lord in the second Sacrament of His Church; a primal and perpetual doctrine in the faith once delivered to the saints. How sadly the simplicity of this hath and has been distorted and disturbed by the gross and sensuous notion of a carnal presence, introduced by the Romish innovation of the eleventh century![41]

The following passage occurs in one of his sermons:—

If there be anything in all the earth to which our Lord did join a blessing, and that for evermore, it was the bread and the cup. Surely of this Sacrament, which the apostles served, it may be said, He that receiveth you receiveth Me. Now, nothing can be more certain than that our Lord and Master, before He suffered death, called into His presence the twelve men, theequalfounders of His future Church. He stood alone with the twelve. There was nobody else there but those ministers and their Lord. Nothing is more manifest than that He took bread of corn, and showed the apostles in what manner and with what words to bless and to break it. Equally clear is it, that their Lord took into His hands, with remarkable gesture and deed, the cup, and taught the twelve also the blessing of the wine. Accordingly, after the Son of man went up, we read that the apostles took bread, and blessed, and gave it to the Church. Likewise also they took the cup.

And, although the Romish Dissenters keep it back to this day, the apostles gave the wine also to the people. St. Paul, who was not one of the twelve, but a bishop afterwards ordained, writes: “We have an altar”. He speaks of the bread which he breaks, and the cup he was accustomed to bless. So we trace from those old apostolic days, down to our own, an altar-table of wood in remembrance of the wooden cross, fine white bread, good and wholesome wine, a ministry descended from the apostles, to be in all ages and in every land the outward and visible signs of a great event—the eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now, nothing can be more plain than that these things, so seen, and handled, and felt, and eaten, and drunk, were delivered to the Church to contain and to convey a deep blessing, an actual grace. They were ordained for this end by Christ Himself: He said of the bread, This is My body;i.e., not a part of My flesh, but a portion of My spiritual presence, a share of that which is Divine.

Again, Jesus said about the cup, This is My blood;i.e., not that which gushed upon the soldier’s spear, but the life-blood of My heavenly heart, that which shall be shed on you from on high with the fruit of the vine—the produce of the everlasting veins of Him who is on the right hand of God.

So was it understood, so is it explained, by apostolic words. Thus said St. Paul, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion—the common reception, that is—the communication to faithful lips of the blood of Christ?”

So we say in our Catechism, that the body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received. We confess that our souls are strengthened and refreshed in the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ: we call the bread and wine in our service heavenly food. We acknowledge that we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink His blood. We declare that in that Sacrament we join Him, and He us, as drops of water that mingle in the sea, and that we are, in that awful hour, very members incorporate in the mystical body of the Son of God,—words well-nigh too deep to apprehend or to explain.

Mr. Hawker, holding, as has been shown, that mediation was distinct from intercession, admitted that the dead in Christ could pray for their brethren struggling in the warfare of life, as really and more effectually than they could when living. If the souls under the altar seen by St. John could cry out for vengeance on those upon earth, surely they could also ask for mercy to be shown them.

He thought that all the baptised had six sponsors, the three on earth and three in heaven. Those in heaven were the guardian angel of the child, the saint whose name the child bore, and the saint to whom the church was dedicated in which the baptism took place; and that, as it was the duty of earthly sponsors to look after and pray for their godchildren, so it was the privilege and pleasure of their heavenly patrons to watch and intercede for their welfare.

He did not see why Christians should not ask the prayers of those in bliss, as well as the prayers of those in contest; and he contended that this was a very different matter from Romish invocation of saints, that invested the blessed ones with all but Divine attributes, and which he utterly repudiated. He quoted Latimer, Bishop Montague, Thorndike, Bishop Forbes, in the seventeenth century; and Dean Field, and Morton, Bishop of Durham, etc., as holding precisely the same view as himself.

Of course his doctrines to some seem to be perilously high. But in the English Church there are various shades of dogmatism, and the faintest tinge to one whose views are colourless is a great advance. The slug at the bottom of the cabbage-stalk thinks the slug an inch up the stalk very high, and the slug on the stalk regards the slug on the leaf as perilously advanced, whilst the slug on the leaf considers the snail on the leaf-end as occupying an equivocal position.

Catholicism and Popery have really nothing necessarily in common. The first is a system of belief founded on the Incarnation, the advantages of which it applies to man through a sacramental system; while the latter is a system of ecclesiastical organisation, which has only accidentally been linked with Catholicism, but which is equally at home in the steppes of Tartary with Buddhism.

Popery is a centralisation in matter of Church government: it is autocracy. A man may be theoretically an Ultramontane without being even a Christian, for he may believe in a despotism. And a man may be a Catholic in all his views, without having the smallest sympathy with Popery. As a matter of fact, the most advanced men in the English Church are radically liberal in their views of Church government; and if they strive with one hand to restore forgotten doctrines, and reinstate public worship, with the other they do battle for the introduction of Constitutionalism into the organisation of the Church of England, the element of all others most opposed to Popery.

It is quite possible to distinguish Catholicism from Romanism. Romanism has developed a system—a miserable system of indulgences and dispensations on one side, and restraints on the other—all issuing from the throne of St. Peter, as an impure flood from a corrupt fountain, and which has sadly injured Christian morals. A student of history cannot fail to notice that the Papacy has been a blight on Christianity, robbing it of its regenerating and reforming power, a parasitic growth draining it of its life-blood. He may love, with every fibre of his soul, the great sacramental system, the glorious Catholic verities, common to Constantinople and Rome, to Jerusalem and Moscow; but it is only to make him bitterly regret that they have been used as a vehicle for Romish cupidity, so as to make them odious in the eyes of Protestants. Holding Catholic doctrines, and enjoying Catholic practices, an English Churchman may be as far removed in temper of soul from Rome as any Irish Orangeman.

Mr. Hawker held the Blessed Virgin in great reverence. The ideal of womanhood touched his poetical instincts. Yet he checked his exuberant fancy, when dealing with this theme, by his conscience of what was right and fitting. He says, in a sermon on the text: “He stretched forth His hand towards His disciples, and said, Behold My mother and My brethren; for whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother and sister and mother:” “His mother also, whom the angel had pronounced blessed among women, because on her knees the future Christ should lie, sought to usurp the influence of nature over the Son Divine. But to teach that although in the earth He was not all of the earth, and aware of the blind idolatry which future men would yield unto her who bare Him, and those to whom His Incarnation in their family gave superior name, Jesus publicly renounced all domestic claim to His particular regard. More than once did He remind Mary, His mother, that in His miraculous nature she did not partake; that in the functions of His Godhead she had nothing to do with him.”

The Rev. W. Valentine, rector of Whixley, perhaps the most intimate friend Mr. Hawker had, writes to me of him thus:—

During the first six months of my residence at Chapel House, Morwenstow, September, 1863, to April, 1864, I and he invariably spent our evenings together; and although for ten weeks of that period I took the Sunday morning and evening duties at Stratton Church, during the illness of the vicar, I always rode round by Morwenstow vicarage on Sundays to spend an hour with him, at his urgent request, though it took me some miles out of my way over Stowe Hill and by Combe. I thus got to know Mr. Hawker thoroughly, more intimately perhaps, as to character and social habits, than any other friend ever did; and on two important points no one will ever shake my testimony,viz.(a) his desire to be buried by me beneath the shadow of his own beloved church, “That grey fane, the beacon of the Eternal Land”; and (b) his constant allusions to the Roman Catholics as “Romish Dissenters”.

But Mr. Hawker was not a theologian, nor was he careful in the expression of his opinions. He spoke as he thought at the moment, and he thought as the impulse swayed him. Many of his most intimate friends, who met him constantly during the last years of his life, and to whom he opened his heart most fully, are firm in their conviction that he was a sincere member of the Church of England, believing thoroughly in her Divine mission and authority. But it is quite possible, that, in moments of excitement and disappointment, to others he may have expressed himself otherwise. He was the creature of impulse; and his mind was never very evenly balanced, nor did his judgment always reign paramount over his fancies.

Mr. Valentine writes in another letter to me:—

I have only one sermon to send you, but tomeit is a deeply interesting one, as it was delivered more than once just over the spot where he told me so often to lay him; and I feel assured that whenever he preached it, his thoughts would wander onward to that coming day when he himself, as he contemplated, would form one of that last and vast assemblage which will be gathered in Morwenstow churchyard and church. Ever since I knew dear old Hawker, and for years before, he preachedextempore. His habit was to take a prayer-book into the pulpit, and expound the Gospel for the day. He would read a verse or two, and then with a common lead pencil, which was ever suspended by a string from one of his coat-buttons, mark his resting-point. Having expounded the passage, he would read further, mark again, and expound. His clear, full voice was most mellifluous; and his language, whilst plain and homely, was highly poetical, and quite enchanting to listen to. He riveted one’s whole attention. His pulpit MSS. are very rare, because, just before taking toextemporepreaching, “basketsful” of his sermons were destroyed under the following circumstances, as he used to relate it to me: A celebrated firm of seedsmen advertised something remarkable in the way of carrots; and Mr. Hawker, who had long made this root his especial study, sent for some seed. He was recommended to sow it with some of the best ashes he could procure, and therefore brought out all his sermons one morning on to the vicarage lawn, set fire to the pile, and carefully collected the precious remains. The crop was an utter failure; but the cause thereof, on reflection was most palpable. He remembered that a few of old Dr. Hawker’s sermons were lying amongst his own; and the conclusion forced upon him was, that his grandfather’s heterodoxy had lost him his crop of carrots.

He refers to this destruction in another letter to Mr. Carnsew:—

Dec.6, 1857.My dear Sir,—To-morrow I send for my last load of materials for building, the close of a long run of outlay extending through nearly thirty years. Bude, Whitstone, Trebarrow, Morwenstow, have been the scenes of my architecture. Anderson writes that he has bought a cottage of yours. I am glad of it for his wife’s sake. I wrote to him offering a young pig of mine, and twelve MS. sermons, for a young boar of the same age; and, do you know, he has taken me at my word. So I am to send him my MSS. and to fetch the boar. Did I ever tell you that I once dressed a drill of turnips for experiment with sermon ashes (I had been burning a large lot), and it was a complete failure? Barren, all barren, like most modern discourses; not even posthumous energy.

The sermon that is spoken of by Mr. Valentine was on the general resurrection, and was preached at the “Revel,” Midsummer Day.

The Revel or Village Feast is—in some places was—a great institution in Cornwall and West Devon, held on the day of the Saint to whom the church is dedicated.

One of his sermons which is remembered to this day was on the text, Gen. xxii. 5: “Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.”

He pointed out in this sermon how that in Morwenstow and many other villages, the church is situated at some distance from the congregation. At Okehampton the church is on a hill, and the town lies below it in the valley. At Brent-tor it is planted on the apex of a volcanic cone, rising out of a high table-land; and the cottages of which it is the parish church lie in combes far away, skirting the moor. At Morwenstow it stands above the sea, without a house near it save the vicarage and one little farm. This, said he, was no bit of mismanagement, but was done purposely, that those who went up to Jerusalem to worship might have time to compose their thoughts, and frame their souls aright for the holy services in which they were about to engage.

Is it a trouble to go so far? Does it cost many paces? Yea! but an angel counts the paces that lead to the house of God and records them all in heaven.

“Abide ye here with the ass,” away from the hill of the Lord, from the place of sacrifice; tarry, dumb ass and hireling, whilst the son goes on under the guidance of his father. The poor hireling, not one of the family; the unbaptised, no son; and the coarse, brutal nature, the ass—they stay away; they have no inclination, no call to go up to the house of God. “Abide ye here with the ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship.”

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