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 impending severance of Knight and his congregation from his Church. Knight and his congregation seceded from St. Enoch's Free Church, Dundee on October 22, 1873.
Greeting him on his return to Dundee "with assurance of my concern for your domestic anxieties...I trust that the approaching meetings of the Committee & Presbytery will add no further to the difficulties in which you have been involved...I imagine, indeed, they will be afraid to make demands of you which they must know you will not concede; and will be unwilling to drive you into a step (such as the secession of yourself & your congregation) by which no one would lose anything but themselves, while you would in every way have all the gain - save indeed, the pain of severance from the church of your fathers;" commenting on an article Knight published in the Contemporary Review; giving him news of his parents and a "manual of psychology, based on physiology" on which his father is working and explaining the concepts behind it; asking him to write and let him know what happens in the meetings; adding "...those were untroubled days in the spring: before I knew anything about doctors, - and you but little of Committees of Inquisition. I only wish you might vanquish your difficulties as easily as I have mine!"