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’s Peranzabuloe 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’s History of the Holy Eastern Church came 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 is never so 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 Father is, 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