Yours faithfully,
R. S. Hawker.
Natum ante omnia sæcula.
The first star gleamed over Nazareth, when thus the Lady said unto her Son: “Jesu, wilt thou not arise and go with me into the field that we may hear the sweet chime of the birds as they chant their evening psalm?”—“Yea, Mary, mother,” answered the awful Boy, “yea, for I love their music well. I have loved it long. I listened, in My gladness, to the first-born voices of the winged fowl, when they break forth into melody among the trees of the Garden, or ever there was a man to rejoice in their song. Twain, moreover, after their kind, the eagle and the dove, did My Father and I create, to be the token-birds of our Spirit, when He should go forth from us to thrill the world of time.”
His theory was that the eagle symbolised the Holy Ghost in His operation under the old covenant, and the dove His work in the Church. The double-headed eagle, so often found in mediæval churches—and there is one carved on a boss at Morwenstow—he thought represented the twofold effusion of the Spirit in two dispensations.
The following “Carol of the Kings” was written during the Epiphany of 1859, and published with the signature “Nectan” in a Plymouth paper:—
A CAROL OF THE KINGS.
[It is chronicled in an old Armenian myth[[33]] that the wise men of the East were none other than the three sons of Noe, and that they were raised from the dead to represent, and to do homage for, all mankind in the cave at Bethlehem! Other legends are also told: one, that these patriarch-princes of the Flood did not ever die, but were rapt away into Enoch’s Paradise, and were thence recalled to begin the solemn gesture of world-wide worship to the King-born Child! Another saying holds, that, when their days were full, these arkite fathers fell asleep, and were laid at rest in a cavern at Ararat until Messias was born, and that then an angel aroused them from the slumber of ages to bow down and to hail, as the heralds of many nations, the awful Child. Be this as it may—whether the mystic magi were Shem, Cham, and Japhet, in their first or second existence, under their own names or those of other men, or whether they were three long-descended and royal sages from the loins or the land of Baalam, one thing has been delivered to me for very record. The supernatural shape of clustering orbs which was embodied suddenly from surrounding light, and framed to be the beacon of that westward-way, was and is the Southern Cross! It was not a solitary signal-fire, but a miraculous constellation, a pentacle of stars, whereof two shone for the transom and three for the stock; and which went above and before the travellers, day and night, radiantly, until it came and stood over where the young Child lay! And then? What then? Must those faithful orbs dissolve and die? Shall the gleaming trophy fall? Nay—not so. When it had fulfilled the piety of its first-born office, it arose, and, amid the vassalage of every stellar and material law, it moved onward and onward, obedient to the impulse of God the Trinity, journeying evermore towards the south, until that starry image arrived in the predestined sphere of future and perpetual abode: to bend, as to this day it bends, above the peaceful sea, in everlasting memorial of the Child Jesus: the Southern Cross!]
Three ancient men in Bethlehem’s cave
With awful wonder stand: