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 to The 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 Lord daily, 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.