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;’