Untitled - Electric Scotland

88 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. iv.
years, was the ingenious distortion, as he deemed it, of
the meaning of plain English
compatible with the very errors they
formularies to make them
were intended to
oppose. His position in this controversy corresponded in
some degree to that which he had taken three years before
with regard to his own candidature for the Glasgow
Professorship. It was a question of the plain and natural
meaning of words, and the course which he now criticised
in others was the course he had himself indignantly declined
to take. But against the introduction of personalities or
recriminations into the controversy he contended with all
his might. There were some among his friends who would
gladly have joined in the original protest, but whose
co-operation, as his correspondence shows, he deliberately
declined, lest the issues involved should be narrowed, and
the controversy needlessly embittered. The following
letter to Mr. Golightly, his Baldon colleague, was called
forth by a communication sent by Mr. Golightly
to the
Standard, a few weeks after the Tract XC. explosion,
accusing Mr. Ward and others of being disguised Romanists,
and referring to a private visit Mr. Ward had paid to Dr.
Wiseman at Oscott College :-
The Rev. A. C. Tait to the Rev. C. P. Golightly.
"
BALLIOL \Nov. 15, 1841].
" MY DEAR GOLIGHTLY, I yesterday evening heard the subject
of your letter canvassed, and it was the general opinion that the
step was unjustifiable. ... I disliked, as you knew, your last
Tract, as transgressing the rule which it is desirable to keep up in
Oxford, of not speaking, or at least not speaking any evil, of one s
antagonists, and I should be if extremely sorry bitterness or harsh
ness to individuals were to be introduced into the controversy. . . .
On a matter of this kind no man s advice is worth much of whom
you are not sure that he has a high personal regard for yourself.
Having, however, put you in possession of what I think, which
I should not have been justified in withholding I doubt not that