Acquired as part of a large collection of letters addressed to William Angus Knight, Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and Wordsworth scholar. Items in the collection have been individually accessioned and cataloged.
Written from "7 Lifton Place / Leeds."
The year of writing is not given, however, Carpenter refers to the severance of Knight and his congregation from his Church. Knight was censured by the Presbytery and he and his congregation subsequently seceded from St. Enoch's Free Church, Dundee on October 22, 1873.
Concerning the secession of Knight and his congregation from his church; saying "I wish indeed that I could congratulate you on being a minister of a really 'Free Church': it must have been a source of deep pain to you to see the body to which you belong limiting so rigidly the conditions of ecclesiastical fellowship. I gather indeed that you do not personally accept that limitation, - nay that you maintain your protest against it: but how far will it be possible for you in future to repeat an act which will make you liable to the highest censures of the Church? I do not for a moment construe your refraining from an 'appeal' into an acquiescence in the sentence: I wish, indeed, for my own part that you had felt it your duty to obtain a fuller discussion of the question before a wider public: I am sure you would have had the whole consensus of lay opinion outside the Church to support you, & that would have affected the leaders more sensibly than it influences a comparatively private body like a local Presbytery. But at the same time I appreciate & respect your unwillingness further to disturb the harmony of your Church by a controversy that may provoke much bitterness. How virulent, indeed, the animus already is with which you are pursued is evident from the further action of Dr. Wilson, in insisting on a Committee of Inquisition into your Article & Sermons. They will be asking next for a Com'ee to overhaul your library, and inspect your MSS! To me, indeed, the mere notion of such constant espionage would be intolerable, & I would sooner submit to any isolation than live in such an atmosphere of concealment and suspicion. I wonder amid all this hubbub that your little hymn book has escaped condemnation, or at any rate, scrutiny...I would indeed, that we shared the same views of religious duty: believe, however, that I can respect convictions which I am at the same time ready to dispute, & can sympathize deeply with trials from which there may yet seem to me a ready method of escape. But I will not further intrude myself on the most sacred secrets of your soul. I delight rather to think of the stimulus I have receiving from you than of the differences wh. still part us."