A playwright in the pulpit seems an anomaly. The stage and the pulpit
have generally been at bitter war. Jeremy Collier had the best of it in
his day, and I believe would have the best of it in ours. The stage with
its paint and sawdust and glaring gas--the stage as it is--is the last
place to which an earnest man would turn with hope. Originally
religious, it has long ceased to be such. It has become simply an
amusement--if the reproduction of all that is heartless and flippant and
rotten in society be considered as such. Our English Catos don't go to
the theatre at all, and when one who is not a Cato goes there, it becomes
to him a sight melancholy rather than otherwise, unless he have sunk
altogether into the unhappy life of that dullest of all dogs, a gay man
about town. As to the stage being a school of morals, the idea is the
most preposterous that ever entered the head of man. At the best, when
it collects a goodly company--when it is lit up with beauty--when it
resounds with merriment--when it is electrified by wit--it is a pleasant
place for the consumption of an idle hour. More it is not now. More it
has never been since people could read and write. More it can never be.
Yet even the stage has had its saints, as in old times the world gave up
its high-spirited and gay to the cause of God. If emperors have become
monks, it is not wonderful nor surpassing the bounds of probability that
men should give up writing plays and take to writing sermons instead. A
few years back Gerald Griffin exchanged the world for a monastery. In
our own day Sheridan Knowles is an example of a still greater change, for
he has left the stage for the pulpit, and has consecrated the evening of
his life to the advocacy of Christian truth. I fear in this latter
character he is not so successful as in his former. Well do I remember
him at the Haymarket. It was the first time I ever was inside a theatre.
The enjoyment of the evening, I need not add, was intense. A first visit
to a theatre is always enough to bewilder the brain. You never see men
of such unsullied honour--women of such gorgeous beauty--scenes of such
thrilling interest in real life--and when I learned that the drama itself
was the production of Knowles, my admiration of him knew no bounds. But
I confess in the pulpit he did not appear to me to so great an advantage.
It may be that I am older. It may be that time has robbed me, as he does
every one else, of the wonder and enthusiasm which, to the eye of youth,
makes everything it looks on beautiful and bright. It may be that I, as
every one else does, feel daily more deeply--
'The inhuman dearth
Of noble natures;'
but nevertheless the fact, I fear, is but clear, that Knowles does not
shine in the pulpit as he did on the stage, which he has now renounced
some years. Of course he has a crowd to hear him, for a player turned
parson is a nine days' wonder, and run after as such. The question is
not, can he read well? not, can he convey his thoughts in elegant
language? not, can he compose a lecture which, to his own satisfaction,
at least, can demolish insolent popes and self-conceited Unitarians,
against which classes he principally labours; but can he preach--preach
so that men are awe-struck--acknowledge a divine influence, and shudder
as they look back on the buried past? I fear this question must be
answered in the negative.
Let us imagine ourselves in one of the numerous Baptist chapels of the
metropolis--for to that denomination of Christians does Mr. Knowles
belong--while he is preaching 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. It was in Glasgow that he was baptized, and became a
member of the church. That he should turn preacher was natural.
Accustomed to address public audiences, there was no necessity why he
should give up the practice, and there were many reasons why he should
not. Accordingly, every Sunday almost he is engaged in preaching, and
occasionally takes lecturing engagements in the country. He is also
Professor of Elocution at the Baptist College, Stepney--a teacher of
deportment--a clerical Turvey-drop to the pious youth of that respectable
institution. This is all very well. If art is of use--if it can make
the eloquent more eloquent, and the dull less so--its aid should surely
be invoked by the Christian Church.
I would only add, that Mr. Knowles is an Irishman,--that he was born in
1784,--and that his plays, especially the Hunchback, still retain
possession of the stage.