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.