Youth, manhood, old age, past,Come to thy God at last!
Youth, manhood, old age, past,Come to thy God at last!
Youth, manhood, old age, past,Come to thy God at last!
Youth, manhood, old age, past,
Come to thy God at last!
The funeral took place on Wednesday, 18th August. The body had been transferred to the Roman Catholic Cathedral the night before. At 10A.M.a solemn requiem mass was sung by the Very Rev. Canon Woollet, the vicar-general of the titular diocese. Around the coffin were six lighted candles, and a profusion of flowers.
During the playing of the “Dead March in Saul,” and the tolling of the church bell, the coffin was removed to the hearse, to be conveyed to the Plymouth cemetery. The coffin was of oak, with a plain brass cross on it, and bore the inscription:—
ROBERT STEPHEN HAWKER.FOR FORTY-ONE YEARS VICAR OF MORWENSTOW,WHO DIED IN THE CATHOLIC FAITH,ON THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION OF OUR BLESSED LADY,1875.Requiescat in Pace. Amen.
ROBERT STEPHEN HAWKER.FOR FORTY-ONE YEARS VICAR OF MORWENSTOW,WHO DIED IN THE CATHOLIC FAITH,ON THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION OF OUR BLESSED LADY,1875.Requiescat in Pace. Amen.
ROBERT STEPHEN HAWKER.
FOR FORTY-ONE YEARS VICAR OF MORWENSTOW,
WHO DIED IN THE CATHOLIC FAITH,
ON THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION OF OUR BLESSED LADY,
1875.
Requiescat in Pace. Amen.
It is far from my intention to enter into controversy over the last sad transaction in the life of him whose memoir I have written. The facts are as I have stated, and might have been made clearer had I been at liberty to use certain letters, which I have seen, but am not allowed to quote.
According to Roman Catholic doctrine, there is no salvation for those who die outside the Church, unless they have remained in ignorance of Catholic verities. No such plea could be urged in the case of Mr. Hawker; and therefore, from the point of view of a Romanist, his damnation was assured.
A Roman Catholic priest is bound by the rules of his Church, and in doubtful cases by the decisions of eminent canonists. The “Rituale Romanum” for the baptism of adults provides for the baptism of those who are unconscious, and even raving mad, on the near approach of death, if there have appeared in them, when conscious, a desire for baptism;[46]and the apparent satisfaction expressed by Mr. Hawker’s face on Saturday morning was sufficient to express acquiescence, passive if not active. How far he was aware of what was proposed, with his brain partly paralysed, is open to question. However, in the case of such a sickness, the patient is regarded in the same light as an infant, and passive acquiescence is admitted as sufficient to justify the administration of the sacrament.
Dens, a great authority, in hisTheologia Moralis et Dogmatica, says that in the case of those who are out of their mind, with no prospect of a lucid interval—which would, of course, include the period of unconsciousness before death—baptism may be administered, if there be reason to conjecture that the patient desired it when of sound mind. And, as no proofs are laid down for testing the desire, the rule is a very elastic one.[47]
Billuart, however, asserts that, for the sacrament of penitence, full consciousness is necessary, as an act of penitence is an essential part of it; so that, though a man may be baptised who is insane or unconscious, such a man cannot be absolved. Marchantius, in hisCandelabrum Mysticum, lays down that a man may be baptised when drunk, as well as when unconscious, or raving mad, if he had before shown a disposition to receive the sacrament.
Practically, no doubt, moved by desire to assure the salvation of the patient, Roman Catholic clergy will charitably trust to there being a disposition, on very slight grounds. The following instance will show this, communicated to me by a learned English divine: “Some time ago a lady wrote to me for counsel, on this ground. Her father-in-law, a very aged man, a Unitarian, had died whilst she was helping to nurse him, and had been unconscious for some days before his death. A very well-known and distinguished Roman Catholic wrote a letter to her, which she forwarded to me to read, blaming her very severely for not having seized the opportunity for baptising him, on the ground that hemighthave changed his views, andmighthave desired baptism, and that the sacrament, so administered, would have been his passport to heaven. She consulted me as to her blameworthiness, and as to whether she had, in fact, to reproach herself with a failure of duty. I replied in the negative, and stated that the purely mechanical view of the sacrament taken by her correspondent was, to say the least, highly untheological. I do not give the names, but you may cite me as having supplied you with this fact, which happened this year (1875).”
A case was brought before my notice also, of a man being baptised when dying in a condition of delirium tremens. To the English mind such a case is very shocking, but it is one provided for by Marchantius. In this case it was conjectured that the man had desired baptism into the Roman communion: he had previously been a member, though an unworthy one, of the English Church, and had shown no desire of secession.
I cannot dismiss this part of my subject without dealing briefly with an accusation made against Mr. Hawker by certain correspondents in the papers. They did not shrink from charging him with having been for many years a Roman Catholic at heart, only holding on his position of the Church of England for the sake of the loaves and fishes it offered him.
If I had considered there were grounds for this charge, his life would never have been written by me.
How far Mr. Hawker was a consenting party to the reception, how far he had gone towards contemplating such a change when incapacitated by paralysis from forming a decision, I cannot decide. The testimony is conflicting. I hesitate to believe that it was his intention to leave the Church of England before he died. He was swayed this way or that by those with whom he found himself. He was vehement in one direction one day, as impetuous in another direction on the day following.
No one who knew Mr. Hawker intimately, not one of his nearest relatives, his closest friends to whom he opened his heart, can believe that he was a conscious hypocrite. If there was one quality which was conspicuous in his character it was his openness. He could not act a part, he could not retain unspoken a thought that passed through his brain, even when common judgment would have deemed concealment of the thought advisable. He was transparent as a Dartmoor stream; and all his thoughts, beliefs and prejudices lay clearly seen in his mind, as the quartz and mica and hornblende particles on the brook’s white floor.
If there was one vice which, with his whole soul, he abhorred, it was treachery in its every form.
Be true to Church, be kind to poor,O minister, for evermore!
Be true to Church, be kind to poor,O minister, for evermore!
Be true to Church, be kind to poor,O minister, for evermore!
Be true to Church, be kind to poor,
O minister, for evermore!
were his lines cut by him over his vicarage door.
In 1873 or 1874 the rector of Kilkhampton was about to go to Exeter to preach an ordination service in its cathedral. The vicar of Morwenstow said to him: “Go, and bid the young men entering the holy ministry be honest, loyal, true.” Is that the exhortation of a man conscious in his own heart that he is a traitor?
One day, not long ago, he was in Kilkhampton, and entered the house of an old man, a builder, there.
The old man said to him: “You know, Mr. Hawker, what names you have been called in your day. They have said you were a Roman Catholic.”
“Hockeridge,” answered Mr. Hawker, standing in the midst of the floor, and speaking with emphasis, “I am a priest of the Church, of the Church of God, of that Church which was hundreds of years in Cornwall before a Pope of Rome was thought of.”
A clergyman in the diocese of London, who knew him well, thus writes:—
I think I never read any announcement with greater surprise than that the late vicar of Morwenstow had, shortly before his death, been “received” into the Church of Rome. Mr. Hawker and I were intimate friends for a number of years, and there were few matters connected either with himself or those near and dear to him on which he did not honour me with his confidence. It was just a year ago that I spent some days with him, shortly after his visit to London, to collect funds for the restoration of his interesting church, among the scenes he loved so well; and I feel perfectly assured, had he then meditated such a step, or had he so much as allowed it to assume a form in his mind, however indefinite, it would have been among the subjects of our converse. Nothing, however, was more contrary to the fact. I am certain that at that time not an idea of such a thing occurred to him. I received most confidential letters from him down to a short period before his death; and there is not a line in them which hints at any change in those opinions which had not only become part of himself, but which, as opportunity offered, he was accustomed to defend with no small amount either of logic or of learning. My friend was a man of profound learning, of very great knowledge of passing events, and able to estimate aright the present aspect of the Church and her difficulties. He was also a man of transparent honesty of purpose, of the nicest sense of honour, and of bold and fearless determination in the discharge of his duties. On two matters he was an enthusiast—the scenery and the early Christian history of his beloved Cornwall, and, which is more to my purpose, the position and rights of the Church of which he was, in my most solemn belief, a dutiful and faithful priest. He was never weary of asserting her claim as the Catholic Church of England, possessed of orders as good as those of any other branch of the Sacred Vine, and alone possessed of the mission which could make their exercise available. His very aspect was that of the master in Israel, conscious of his indubitable position, and whose mind was thoroughly made up on questions about which many other men either have no certain opinions, or at least have no such ground for holding them as that with which his learning and acuteness at once supplied him. Such was the late vicar of Morwenstow, one of the very last men in England to leave the Church of which he gloried to be a priest, of whose cause he was at all times the most unyielding defender, and in whose communion it was his hope and prayer to die.
Nevertheless I think it possible, that during the last year or two of his life, when failing mentally as well as bodily, and when labouring under the excitement or subsequent depression caused by the opium he ate to banish pain, he may have said, or written recklessly, words which are capable of being twisted into meaning a change of views. There can be little doubt that the taking of narcotics deadens the moral sense, the appreciation of Truth, and possibly, towards the end, Mr. Hawker may have had hankerings Romeward. But we must consider the man as he was when sound in body and in mind, and not when stupified by pain, and the medicines given to deaden the pain.[48]I have laboured, above all things, in this book, to give a true picture of the man I describe: I have not painted an ideal portrait.
And now my work is done. I have written truthfully the life of this most remarkable man: I have taken care to “nothing extenuate, nor aught set down in malice.” I cannot more worthily conclude my task than with the peroration of Mr. Hawker’s visitation sermon, already quoted.
‘The day is far spent, and the night is at hand: the hour cometh wherein no man can work. A little while, and all will be over.’ ‘Their love and their hatred, and their envy, will have perished; neither will they any longer have a name under the sun.’ The thousand thoughts that thrill our souls this day, with the usual interests and the common sympathies of an earthly existence—of all these there will not, by-and-by, survive in the flesh a single throb. This, our beloved father in the Church, will have entered into the joy of his Lord, to prefer, perchance, in another region, affectionate supplications for us who survive and remain. We, who are found worthy, shall be gathered to a place and people where the strifes and the controversies of earth are unnoted and unknown. “Violence shall no more be heard in that land, wasting nor destruction within its borders; but they shall call the gates Salvation and the walls Praise. There the envy of Ephraim shall depart and the adversaries of Judah shall be cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim.”
Nevertheless all will not perish from the earth. That which hath done valiantly in the host will not glide away into a land where all things are forgotten. Although the sun may go down while it is yet day, it shall come to pass that at evening tide there shall be light. Moses is dead, and Aaron is dead, and Hur is gathered to his fathers also; but, because of their righteous acts in the matter of Rephidim, their memorial and their name live and breathe among us for example and admonition still. So shall it be with this generation. He, our spiritual lord, whose living hands are lifted up in our midst to-day—he shall bequeath to his successors and to their children’s children, the eloquent example and the kindling heritage of his own stout-hearted name. And we, the lowlier soldiers of the war—so that our succour hath been manifest and our zeal true—we shall achieve a share of humble remembrance as the duteous children of Aaron and of Hur.
They also, the faithful few, who have lapped the waters of dear old Oxford, and who were the little company appointed to go down upon the foe with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, and to prevail—honour and everlasting remembrance for their fearless names! If, in their zeal, they have exceeded; if, in the dearth of sympathy and the increase of desolation, they should even yet more exceed—nay, but do Thou, O Lord God of Jeshurun, withstand them in that path, if they should forsake the house of the mother that bare them for the house of the stranger!
Still let it never be forgotten, that their voices and their volumes were the signals of the dawn that stirred the heart of a slumbering people with a shout for the mastery. Verily, they have their reward. They live already in the presence of future generations; and they are called, even now, by the voices yet unborn, the giants of those days, the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown!
Whosoever shall win the war, whatsoever victories may wait hereafter on the armies of the living God, it shall never fail from the memory and heart of England, who and what manner of men were they that, when the morning was yet spread upon the mountains, arose, and went down to the host, and brake the pitcher, and waved the lamp and blew the trumpet in the face of Midian!
God Almighty grant that they and their adversaries and we ourselves also, may look on each other’s faces and be at rest, one day, in the city of God, among the innumerable company of angels, and the first-born whose names are written in heaven, and the spirits of just men made perfect, and Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, through the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel!