Untitled - Electric Scotland

472 UFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. xvi.
internal complications, and for some weeks his life again
hung in the balance. Early in November he was able to
be moved to Edinburgh, and soon afterwards to Brighton,
but he was greatly shattered, and not a few of his friends
were convinced that his active days were over. It was
the year of his third Diocesan Visitation, and he had
already, when his illness began, been busy upon his Charge.
He was now able to complete it for publication, but the
doctors peremptorily
refused to allow him to deliver it in
person, and would not even consent to his being present at
the visitation. The Charge was read for him in St. Paul s
Cathedral by his Chancellor, Dr. Twiss. Elaborated as it
was in the quiet of his sick-room, it is perhaps, in style and
diction, the most careful of all his public utterances, and
its publication evoked such letters as the following :-
Dean Stanley wrote :-
"
I do thank you in every sense for your Charge. In my
humble it opinion is quite the best that you have delivered. I do
not agree with all of it, but I am sure that even the parts with
which I do not agree will do good, and the whole result ought
indeed to be a sursum corda. v
Dean Hook wrote from Chichester :-
"
It does one good to read such words of wisdom in this day
of rebuke and blasphemy. If any of your spiritual children were
inclined to follow the example of the sons of Sophocles, you have,
like Sophocles, convinced the world that under the depression of
illness, your mind is, I should say, even more vigorous than
before. You have never written more powerfully. I have parti
cularly to thank you for what you have said of sisterhoods. It
has settled my mind upon the . . .
subject. You occupy so very
important and peculiar a position at the present time, that you are
in duty bound to take warning from your predecessor, and to let
others do those details of work which they can do as well as their
Principal, reserving yourself for that which pertains to your char
acter as a man as well as of a bishop. Mrs. Tait will give her
sanction to this sermon, however unbecoming it may
be on the