Untitled - Electric Scotland

1841] ESTIMATE OF NEWMAN 89
you will act rightly. But pray remember that any appearance of
bitterness or a persecuting spirit is not only wrong in itself, but,
if shown on the right side, will be sure, in the present ticklish
state of opinion in Oxford, to drive many who are now doubtful
into the wrong. Yours very sincerely, A. C. TAIT."
In a similar spirit Tait invariably expressed his con
fidence in the personal character and high purpose of
Dr. Newman himself, and he used in later years to defend
him earnestly against those who took a lower view of his
conduct. But he used at the same time to avow the
distrust he had always felt of his qualifications as a
religious teacher. In the course of a discussion which
took place at Addington in 1877 he was asked to give
his then view of Dr. Newman s character. The following
is a note of his reply :-
"
I have always regarded Newman as having a strange duality
of mind. On the one side is a wonderfully strong and subtle
reasoning faculty, on the other a blind faith,
tirely by
raised almost en
his emotions. It seems to me that in all matters of
belief he first acts on his emotions, and then he brings the
subtlety of his reason to bear, till he has ingeniously persuaded
himself that he is logically right. The result is a condition in
which he is practically unable to distinguish between truth and
falsehood."
But though he abstained from active controversy on
the subject, there was one element in the doctrines now
enunciated by the Tractarians which awoke in the mind
of Archibald Tait something more than a passive resist
ance. In one of his letters about the Glasgow Professor
ship, quoted above, 1 he had referred, with some asperity,
to those
"
who regard the Kirk of Scotland as the
synagogue of Baal," words hardly too strong to describe
the views put forward, for example, by Mr. William Palmer
of Magdalen^ in such a passage as the following :-
1
P. 67.