The Vicar of Morwenstow: Being a Life of Robert Stephen Hawker, M.A.Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
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The Vicar of Morwenstow: Being a Life of Robert Stephen Hawker, M.A.
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Hawker, Robert Stephen, 1803?-1875
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.
He asks, and bread of wheat they bring;
He thirsts for water from the spring
Which flowed of old, and still flows on,
With name and memory of St. John.
Bread and water are given him; and, through the stained windows,
glorious rainbow tints fall over what is set before him. A page looking
on him pities the old man, because—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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