intellect on questions and in methods outside the
customary line of University studies and prejudices;
but the men were too powerful, and their work too
genuine and effective, and too much in harmony with
the temper and tendencies of the time, to be stopped
by impertinence and obstructiveness. Dr. Hawkins
was one of those who made the Oriel Common-room a
place of keen discussion and brilliant conversation,
and, for those days, of bold speculation; while the
College itself reflected something of the vigour and
accomplishments of the Common-room. Dr. Newman,
in the
Apologia, has told us, in touching terms
of acknowledgment, what Dr. Hawkins was when, fifty
years ago, the two minds first came into close contact,
and what intellectual services he believed Dr. Hawkins
had rendered him. He tells us, too, how Dr. Hawkins
had profoundly impressed him by a work in which, with
characteristic independence and guarded caution equally
characteristic, he cuts across popular prejudices and
confusions of thought, and shows himself original
in discerning and stating an obvious truth which had
escaped other people—his work on
Unauthoritative
Tradition. His logical acuteness, his habits
of disciplined accuracy, abhorrent and impatient of
all looseness of thinking and expression, his conscientious
efforts after substantial reality in his sharpest
distinctions, his capacity for taking trouble, his
serious and strong sense of the debt involved in the
possession of intellectual power—all this
would have made him eminent, whatever the times in
which he lived.
But the times in which we live and what they bring
with them mould most of us; and the times shaped the
course of the Provost of Oriel, and turned his activity
into a channel of obstinate and prolonged antagonism,
of resistance and protest, most conscientious but most
uncompromising, against two great successive movements,
both of which he condemned as unbalanced and recoiled
from as revolutionary—the Tractarian first,
and then the Liberal movement in Oxford. Of the
former, it is not perhaps too much to say that he was
in Oxford, at least, the ablest and most hurtful opponent.
From his counsels, from his guarded and measured attacks,
from the power given him by a partial agreement against
popular fallacies with parts of its views, from his
severe and unflinching determination, it received its
heaviest blows and suffered its greatest losses.
He detested what he held to be its anti-Liberal temper,
and its dogmatic assertions; he resented its taking
out of his hands a province of theology which he and
Whately had made their own, that relating to the Church;
he thought its tone of feeling and its imaginative
and poetical side exaggerated or childish; and he
could not conceive of its position except as involving
palpable dishonesty. No one probably guided with
such clear and self-possessed purpose that policy
of extreme measures, which contributed to bring about,
if it did not itself cause, the break-up of 1845.