Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/377

 MORWENSTOW 371 have presented any difficulty. It was disbelief, doubt, that he abhorred. Like Sir Thomas Browne, he was greedy for more mysteries, more marvels, more sublimities for unhesitating acceptance. He was always in sympathy both with the Roman and the early Greek Churches, and sometimes in his own ritual he borrowed from both ; yet he could fulmi- nate hotly enough at times against the excesses of either. He loved deeply and hated strongly ; but the love was permanent and real, the hatred tran- sient and superficial. He had a lifelong bitterness against Dissenters, and lived on the tenderest terms with many. His bark was very much worse than his bite. " I understand, Mr. Hawker," once said a Nonconfor- mist lady to him, "that you have an objection to burying Dissenters ? " " Madam," he replied, " I should be only too delighted to bury you all." But there was no real sting behind the words, and some of his dearest and kindest parishioners were not Churchmen. He spent his days in doing good deeds to man and beast, saving strangers from the devouring sea, or giving their bodies Christian burial ; tutoring the rugged hearts of his people ; and living himself, in spite of much sorrow, dis- appointment, loss, in a world of holy dream and vision, conversing in spirit with saints and angels. Hawker believed that his dear country was given over to doubt and laxity ; and every affliction of war, misfortune, bad weather, he interpreted as the chastening hand of God. He would have had his world coloured entirely by faith and religious observance ; stained as it were, like the glass of church windows, by sacred image and story. But practicalities pressed heavily upon him and almost broke his heart ; his poetic impulse failed under