in the pulpit. You see a shrewd,
sharp-looking old gentleman, dressed in black, with a black
silk-handkerchief around his neck, and with a voice clear and forcible as
the conventional old sea-captain of the stage. He takes a text but
remotely connected with his discourse, and begins. You listen with great
interest at first. The preacher is lively and animated, and is
apparently very argumentative, and nods his head at the conclusion of
each sentence in a most decided manner, as if to intimate that he had
very considerably the best of the argument. Now, this is all very well
for five minutes, or even ten; but when you find this lasting for an
hour--with no heads for you to remember--you naturally grow very weary.
Knowles, I imagine from his preaching, seems to think argument is his
forte; never was a man more mistaken in his life. His sermons are
bundles of little bits of arguments tied up together as a heap of old
sticks, and just as dry. He seems an honest, dogmatic man, certainly not
a great one, and clearly but a moderate preacher after all. A man may
eschew the conventionalities of the stage, and the conventionalities of
the pulpit, and yet fail. Mr. Knowles is a case in point. As a
lecturer, I am told he has been very successful in Scotland. He seems to
suit the Scotch better than the English. He lectures against Popery, and
the Scotch will always listen with kindly feelings to the man who does
that. I don't imagine that in London Mr. Knowles will do much. He is
very controversial. Theology is to him a new study, and he rushes into
it with all the zeal of a juvenile enthusiast. This suits the Scotch,
but not the English. We are a more tolerant folk. We are all orthodox,
of course, but our orthodoxy takes a milder form. We tolerate a clever
George Dawson, an infliction against which Scotland rigidly rebels. We
may be one nation, but we are far from being one people. We yet live on
different fare.

I have already said Mr. Knowles is a Baptist. He has been connected with
that sect ever since he left the stage and became a religious man. It
was in Glasgow, I believe, that he, to use the common phrase of the
evangelical sects, came to a knowledge of the truth. It was in
consequence of his attendance on the ministry of the Rev. Mr. Innes, a
Baptist minister in that city, that the change took place--and that he
was led to look upon the world, and man, and his relation to them both,
in a new light.