Untitled - Electric Scotland

CHAPTER III.
OXFORD BALDON - -BON N.
1834-1841.
TAIT had now set his heart upon obtaining
a Balliol
fellowship, and in the meantime, being entirely dependent
for income upon his own exertions, he remained at Balliol
and took private pupils. It was the birth-time of the
storm which was to shake the University to its centre.
Cardinal Newman dates the start of the Oxford move
ment from Mr. Keble s Assize Sermon, preached
in the
University pulpit on July I4th, 1833, a few months before
Tait took his degree. 1 Then came the famous Had-
leigh Conference, and in September the first of the
Tracts for the Times. It was impossible for a man of
Tait s temperament to be uninterested in what was going
on, but it was as yet mainly an interest from outside.
His natural sympathies and his Scotch training were alike
unecclesiastical, and he does not seem to have been
brought at that time into personal contact with any of the
leaders of the new movement.
"It was a strange experience," writes Principal Shairp, "for
a young man trained anywhere, much more for one born and
bred in Scotland, and brought up a Presbyterian, to enter Oxford
when the religious movement was at its height. He found him
self all at once in the midst of a system of teaching which un
churched himself and all whom he had hitherto known. In his
simplicity he had believed that spiritual religion was a thing of
52
1
Apologia, p. 100.