Untitled - Electric Scotland

58 LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. in.
period of their lives. As far as the mere teaching goes, I be
lieve I have done my duty, but I have not laboured for their
moral and religious good as I ought. Remember that I must
give
account. To-morrow will see me an ordained minister of
Christ, bound to labour in season and out of season for the good
of souls. O God, give me strength, by Thy grace, never for one
instant to lose sight of my spiritual duties to my pupils. Some
of them are fitter to teach me in heavenly things than I to teach
them. ... I must live more a life of prayer. I must pray for
them. ... I rejoice in the prospect that to-morrow I shall be
authorised, bound, to teach and exhort. I trust there is no pre
sumption in saying that my dedication to the ministry is prompted
by the Holy Ghost. O God, give me a greater measure of Thy
Spirit enable me to labour in ;
Thy service, giving myself wholly
to it, for Christ s sake. Amen."
It must have been after making this entry that he was
summoned to what seemed at the time to be the dying
bed of his pupil, Samuel Waldegrave, with whom he
remained throughout the night. Thirty-three years later,
when Archbishop of Canterbury, he knelt once more by
the sick-bed of Samuel Waldegrave, then Bishop of
Carlisle, and was present at his death, on October 1st,
I86Q. 1
Notwithstanding the large number of clergy then
resident in Oxford, some of the country parishes in its
immediate neighbourhood were in a terribly neglected
state.
About five miles to the south east of Oxford, on the
rising ground between the Thame and the Isis, lies the
district of Baldon, or, in its old form, Baudendon, a tract
of sparsely populated land, once under the supervision of
the monks of Dorchester. One Peter de la Mere had
built and endowed a chapel there in 1341, and in process
of time De la Mere s Baldon, now corrupted into
March Baldon/ passed, with its neighbouring parish of
1 See vol. ii. p. 46.