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 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.