Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales. Edwin Paxton Hood
truth has divested them of much of their ancient extravagance; when, therefore, the earnest voice of their native speech became the vehicle for unfolding the higher doctrines of the Christian life, the sufferings of the Redeemer and their relation to eternal laws and human conditions, probably a people was never found whose ears were more open, or whose hearts were more ready to receive, and to be stirred to their utmost depths. Thus Religion—Evangelical Religion—became the very life of the land of Wales.
“There is not a heathen man, woman, or child in all the Principality,” said a very eminent Welshman to us once, probably with some measure of exaggeration; “there are wicked men, and women,” he continued, “unconverted men, and women, but there is not a man, woman, or child throughout Wales who does not know all about Jesus Christ, and why He came into the world, and what He came to do.” Thus, within the memory of the writer of this volume, Religion was the one topic upon which you might talk intelligently anywhere in Wales: with the pitman in the coalmine, with the iron-smelter at the forge, with the farmer by his ingleside, with the labourer in his mountain shieling; and not merely on the first more elementary lessons of the catechism, but on the great bearings and infinite relations of religious things. Jonathan Edwards, and Williams of Rotherham, and Owen, and Bunyan, and Flavel—these men and their works, and a few others like them, were well known; and, especially, the new aspects which the modified opinions of Andrew Fuller had introduced into religious thought; thus, you might often feel surprised when, sitting down in some lowly cottage, you found yourself suddenly caught, and carried along by its owner in a coil of metaphysical argument. This was the soil on which the Welsh preachers had to work, and cast abroad their seed.
No person can have heard anything of the Welsh religious life without having heard also of the immense annual gatherings, the Association meetings, a sort of great movable festival, annually held in Wales, to which everything had to give place, and to which all the various tribes of the various Houses of the Lord came up. Their ordinary Sunday services were crowded, but, upon these great occasions, twenty or twenty-five thousand people would come together; and, to such congregations, their great men, their great preachers, such as those we are about to mention, addressed themselves—addressed themselves not to a mass ignorant and unintelligent, but all thoroughly informed in religious matters, and prepared to follow their preacher whithersoever his imagination or thought might lead him. The reader must not smile when we remind him that Wales was—had been for ages—the land of Bards; a love of poetry, poetry chanted or recited, had always been the Welshman’s passion, and those great writers of our literature who best know what poetry is, have taught us that we are not to look upon those productions with contempt. For ages there had been held in Wales what has been called, and is still called the Eisteddfod, or Cymreigyddion, or the meeting of the Bards and Minstrels; they were, as Pennant has called them, British Olympics, where none but Bards of merit were suffered to rehearse their pieces, or Minstrels of skill to perform. These Association meetings were a kind of religious Eisteddfodd, where the great Welsh preacher was a kind of sacred Bard; he knew nothing of written sermons; he carried no notes nor writings with him to his pulpit or platform, but he made the law and doctrine of religious metaphysics march to the minstrelsy and music of speech; on the other hand, he did not indulge himself in casting about wildfire, all had been thoroughly prepared and rooted in his understanding; and then he went with his sermon, which was a kind of high song, to chant it over the hearts of the multitude. We shall have occasion to show, by many instances, from the lives of their greatest men, how their own hearts had been marvellously prepared.
There is a pleasant anecdote told of one of them, Gryffyth of Caernarvon, how he had to preach one night. Before preaching, staying at a farmhouse on the spot, he desired permission to retire before the service began; he remained in his room a considerable time; the congregation had assembled, still he did not come; there was no sign of his making his appearance. The good man of the house sent the servant to request him to come, as the people had been for some time assembled and waiting. Approaching the room she heard, what seemed to her to be a conversation, going on between two persons, in a subdued tone of voice, and she caught from Mr. Gryffyth the expression, “I will not go unless you come with me.” She went back to her master, and said, “I do not think Mr. Gryffyth will come to-night; there is some one with him, and he is telling him that he will not come unless the other will come too; but I did not hear the other reply, so I think Mr. Gryffyth will not come to-night.”
“Yes, yes,” said the farmer, “he will come, and I warrant the other will come too, if matters are as you say between them; but we had better begin singing and reading until the two do come.” And the story goes on to say that Mr. Gryffyth did come, and the other One with him, for they had a very extraordinary meeting that night, and the whole neighbourhood was stirred by it and numbers were changed and converted. It was Williams of Wern who used to tell this pleasing anecdote; it is an anecdote of one man, but, so far as we have been able to see, it illustrates the way in which they all prepared themselves before they began to speak.
It must not be supposed from this that they imagined that prayer was to dispense with preparation; their great preachers studied hard and deeply, and Williams of Wern, one of the greatest of them all, says, “In order to be a good preacher, usefulness must be the grand aim, usefulness must choose the text and divide it, usefulness must compose the sermon and sit at the helm during the delivery; if the introduction be not clear and pertinent it is evident the preacher does not know whither he is going, and if the inferences are of the same character, it is obvious he does not know where he has been. Unstudied sermons are not worth hearing or having; who would trust his life in the hands of a physician who had never thought of his profession?” But these men never permitted the understanding to supersede emotion, and, when they met the people face to face, the greatest of them went prepared, warmed and kindled, and ready to warm and kindle.
Thus their sermons became a sort of inspired song, full of imagination—imagination very often, and usually, deriving its imagery from no far-off and recondite allusions, never losing itself in a flowery wilderness of expressions, but homely illustrations, ministered to by the things and affairs of ordinary life, and, therefore, instantly preacher and people in emotion were one.
It is indeed true that many of their great preachers repeated the same sermon many times. Why not? So did Whitfield, so did Wesley, so have most eminent preachers done; but this need in no way interfere with—it did not interfere with—the felt necessity for unction on the part of the minister; and as to the people they liked to hear an old favourite again, or a sermon, which they had never heard although they had heard much about it. We believe it was to Christmas Evans a pert young preacher said, “Well, you have given us an old sermon again to-day.”
“What then, my boy?” said the Master of Assemblies; “had you a new one?”
“Certainly,” was the answer.
“Well, but look you,” said the unblushing old culprit, “I would not take a dozen new sermons like yours for this one old sermon of mine.”
“No, nor I,” chimed in a gruff old deacon. “Oh yes, and look you, I should like to hear it again; but as for yours, I never heard it before, and I do not want to hear it again.”
But then the Language! Of course the language had a great deal to do with this preaching power, we do not mean generally, but particularly; on all hands the Welsh is acknowledged to be a wonderful language. A Welshman will tell you that there is no language like it on the face of the earth, but that is a testimony borne by many scholars who are not Welshmen; perhaps there is no other language which so instantly conveys a meaning and at the same time touches emotion to the quick. True, like the Welshman himself, it is bony, and strangers to its power laugh somewhat ignorantly at its never-ending succession of consonants. Somebody has said that the whole language is as if it were made up of such words as our word “strength,” and if the reader will compare in his mind the effect of the word power as contrasted with the word strength, he will feel something of the force of the language, and its fitness for the purposes of impression; but still this conveys but a poor idea of its great attributes.
It is so literal that the competent hearer, or reader, instantly realizes, from its words, things. Well do we remember sitting in Wales with