Untitled - Electric Scotland

io6 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. iv.
it had never before reached. You may call it overwrought, and
too highly strung. Perhaps it was. It was better, however, for
young men to be so, than to be doubters or cynics.
"
Tait s position, both at Oxford and at Balliol, standing as
he did quite outside of this great movement, was a curious,
and, in some respects, a trying one. Brought up in a good
Presbyterian family, he had, as may be supposed, very little
sympathy
with the 4
High Church Party in the English Church,
and never the slightest inclination to Newmanism ; and indeed,
owing to a certain want of poetry in his character, he was long,
if not always, unable to do full justice to the character of the
great leader himself. Meanwhile he had not, like Arnold or
Maurice, anything like a counter system of religious or intellectual
thought, and soon felt himself incapable of resisting an influence
to which he saw so many of those to whom he was most attached
succumbing. Of these his old tutor, and long his dearest friend,
Oakeley, was one of the first. Oakeley, the son of a former
Governor of Madras, and who after passing, as was not unusual,
through the phase of Evangelicalism, joined the Roman Church
about the same time as Newman, had been Tait s earliest friend
at Oxford, and his affection for him ended only with his life. It
is touching to remember that in the last thing which the Arch
bishop ever wrote (a short notice of Mr. Mozley s Reminiscences ),
he spoke of Oakeley and Ward as two of the best men he had
ever known, and I well remember his saying to me on a day
which they had both been spending with him at Fulham, about
the year 1860, It would indeed be disgraceful in me, if I could
ever forget all that Oakeley did for me, when I first came up as
a raw young Scotchman, and with scarcely a friend, to Oxford ;
he was, I think he added, quite a father to me. Their friend
ship continued during the first years of Tait s tutorship, but
Oakeley was gradually drawn into the stream of Newmanism :
and I have no doubt that their entire separation, though unac
companied by any bitterness, was a heavy trial to Tait. Nor
was it mended by the fact that others to whom he was much
attached, his own pupils particularly, were either affected by the
same influence, or of a different way of thinking from himself.
He had, indeed, in Balliol a formidable counter influence in the
person of his brother tutor Ward, wrho,
having been always, as
Lord Tennyson s epitaph describes him, the most unworldly of
mankind, had already also become the most generous of