Untitled - Electric Scotland

122 Ml- K OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [en. v.
sight. And when it was over, the thoughts of a whole year
passed in this place came upon me -the terrible responsibilitythe
little good that has been done the great difficulties that lie-
before me and altogether the separating from all these young
faces, with the certainty that many of them I shall never see on
earth again and yet that for the good or evil they have con
tracted here I shall certainly have to give an account."
On Midsummer-day 1843, the Head-master of Rugby
was married in Elmdon Church to Catharine Spooner,
the youngest daughter of *
Archdeacon Spooner, vicar of
Elmdon. The little volume is now well known in which
Archbishop Tait has himself told the story
of their
wedded life of five-and-thirty years, and his biographer
half shrinks from treading, however reverently, upon holy
ground. But no picture of his life during any one of
those eventful years would be a true one which failed
to show her working in bright activity by his side,
sharing and lightening every labour and every sorrow.
After eagerly embracing in her earlier girlhood the best
teaching of the Evangelical party, to which her father
and his friends belonged, she had fallen, some years
before her marriage, under the influence of the Oxford
school ; and, as the Archbishop has himself told us
"
She could scarcely bear that it should be opposed and spoken
against. She has often told me how, when she heard that one
of the four protesting tutors who helped to bring to a sudden
close the series of the Oxford Tracts was a candidate for the
Head-mastership of Rugby, she earnestly hoped he would not
be successful. ... It was a strange turn of fate which made her
open her heart next year to the very
candidate whose success
she had deprecated, and become the happy partner of his life
at Rugby, Carlisle, Fulham, Lambeth; sharing in all his deepest
and truest interests, helping forward for thirty-five years every
good work which he was called to promote ; united to him in
the truest fellowship of soul, while still tempering by the associa
tions of her early Oxford bias whatever might otherwise have