Christmas Evans Part 1

Christmas Evans.

by Paxton Hood.

CHAPTER I.

_SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF WELSH PREACHING_.

Wales, the Country and the People-Individuality of the Welsh Pulpit-St.

David-The Religious Sense of the People-a.s.sociation Meetings-Gryffyth of Caernarvon-Bardic Character of the Sermons-A Repet.i.tion of Sermons-Peculiarities of the Welsh Language-Its Singular Effects as Spoken-Its Vowels-Its Pictorial Character-The _Hwyl_-Welsh Scenery-Isolated Character of the Old Chapels-Plain Living and High Thinking-Ludicrous Incidents of Uncertain Service-Superst.i.tions of Heathenism-Fondness of the People for Allegory-Haunted Wales-The Rev.

John Jones and the Mysterious Horseman-Old Wild Wales-St.

David's-Kilgerran-Welsh Nomenclature-John Dyer-Old Customs.

WE propose, in the following pages, to give some account of Christmas Evans, the great Welsh preacher; believing that he had a style and manner of preaching which, to English minds and readers, will seem altogether his own, perhaps more admirable than imitable. But before we enter upon the delineation of his life, or attempt to unfold his style, or to represent his method as displayed in his sermons, it may be well to present some concise view of Welsh preaching and Welsh preachers in general, especially those of the last age; for as an order of preaching it has possessed its own very distinctive peculiarities. Some readers may at first indeed inquire, Is not preaching very much the same everywhere, in all counties and in all countries? And Wales, which seems itself in its nearness now only like a district of England, and that district for the most part wild and but scantily peopled,-can there be anything so remarkable about its pulpit work as to make it either capable or worthy of any separate account of its singularities and idiosyncrasies? To most English people Welsh preaching is a phase of religious life entirely unknown: thousands of tourists visit the more conspicuous highways of Wales from year to year, its few places of public resort or more manifest beauty; but Wales is still, for the most part, unknown; its isolation is indeed somewhat disturbed now, its villages are no longer so insulated as of old, and the sounds of advancing life are breaking in upon its solitudes, yet, perhaps, its fairest scenes are still uninvaded. But if the country be unknown, still more unknown are the people, and of its singular preaching phenomena scarcely anything is known, or ever can be known by English people; yet it is not too much to say that, in that little land, during the last hundred years, amidst its wild glens and sombre mountain shadows, its villages retreating into desolate moorlands and winding vales, where seldom a traveller pa.s.ses by, there have appeared such a succession and race of remarkable preachers as could be rivalled-in their own peculiar popular power over the hearts and minds of many thousands, for their eminence and variety-in no other country. Among these, Christmas Evans seems to us singularly representative; eminently Welsh, his attributes of power seem to be especially indicative of the characteristics of the Welsh mind, an order of mind as remarkably singular and individual, and worthy of study, as any national character in the great human family. But even before we mention these, it may be well to notice what were some of the reasons for the eminent influence and usefulness of Christmas Evans, and some of his extraordinary preaching comrades and contemporaries to whom we shall have occasion to refer.

Preaching is, in Wales, the great national characteristic; the Derby Day is not more truly a characteristic of England than the great gatherings and meetings of the a.s.sociations all grouped around some popular favourites. The dwellers among those mountains and upon those hill-sides have no concerts, no theatres, no means of stimulating or satisfying their curiosity. For we, who care little for preaching, to whom the whole sermon system is perhaps becoming more tedious, can form but little idea, and have but little sympathy with that form of religious society where the pulpit is the orchestra, the stage, and the platform, and where the charms of music, painting, and acting are looked for, and found in the preacher. We very likely would be disposed even to look with complacent pity upon such a state of society,-it has not yet expired,-where the Bulwers, the d.i.c.kenses, the Thackerays, and Scotts are altogether unknown,-but where the peculiar forms of their genius-certainly without their peculiar education-display themselves in the pulpit. If our readers suppose, therefore, a large amount of ignorance,-well, upon such a subject, certainly, it is possible to enter easily upon the illimitable. Yet it is such an ignorance as that which developed itself in Job, and in his companions, and in his age-an ignorance like that which we may conceive in aeschylus. In fact, in Wales, the gates of every man's being have been opened. It is possible to know much of the grammar, and the history, and the lexicography of things, and yet to be so utterly ignorant of _things_ as never to have felt the sentiment of strangeness and of terror; and without having been informed about the names of things, it is possible to have been brought into the presence and power of _things_ themselves. Thus, the ignorance of one man may be higher than the intelligence of another. There may be a large memory and a very narrow consciousness. On the contrary, there may be a large consciousness, while the forms it embraces may be uncertain and undefined in the misty twilight of the soul. This is much the state of many minds in Wales. It is the state of feeling, and of poetry, of subtle questionings, high religious musings, and raptures.

This state has been aided by the secludedness of the country, and the exclusiveness of the language,-not less than by the rugged force and masculine majesty and strength of the language;-a language full of angles and sharp goads, admirably fitted for the masters of a.s.semblies, admirably fitted to move like a wind over the soul, rousing and soothing, stirring into storm, and lulling into rest. Something in it makes an orator almost ludicrous when he attempts to convey himself in another language, but very powerful and impressive in that. It is a speaking and living language, a language without any shallows, a language which seems to compel the necessity of thought before using it. Our language is fast becoming serviceable for all that large part of the human family who speak without thinking. To this state the Welsh can never come. That unaccommodating tongue only moves with a soul behind it.

Thus, it is not the first reason, but it is not unimportant to remember, that, until very recently, the pulpit in Wales has been the only means of popular excitement, instruction, or even of entertainment; until very recently the Welsh, like the ancient Hebrew lady, have dwelt among their own people, they have possessed no popular fictions, no published poems, no published emanations either of metaphysics or natural science; immured in their own language, as they were, less than a century since, among their own mountains, their language proved a barrier to the importation of many works accessible to almost all the other languages of Europe. It may be said that religion, as represented through the men of the pulpit, has made Wales what she is. When the first men of the pulpit, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowlands, and others, arose, they found their country lying under a night of spiritual darkness, and they effected an amazing reformation; but then they had no compet.i.tive influences to interfere with their progress, or none beyond that rough, rude sensuality, that barbarism of character, which everywhere sets itself in an att.i.tude of hostility to spiritual truth and to elevated holiness; there were no theatres or race courses, there was no possibility that the minds of the mult.i.tudes should be occupied by the intellectual casuistries of a later day; Wales possessed no Universities or Colleges, and very few Schools; on the other hand, there were some characteristics of the national mind very favourable to the impulse these men gave, and the impressions they produced. So it has happened that the Welsh preacher has been elevated into an importance, reminding us of the Welsh tradition concerning St.

David, the patron saint of Wales, regarding whom it is said, that, while preaching in the year 520, in Cardigan, against the Pelagian heresy, such was the force of his argument, and the eloquence of his oratory, that the very ground on which he stood rose beneath his feet and elevated itself into a hillock; and there, in after ages, a church was erected upon the spot to which awful tradition pointed as the marvellous pulpit of the patron saint.

Three-fourths of any amount of power which either or any of these first preachers, or their successors, have obtained over their countrymen, and countrywomen, arises from the fact that the Welsh possess, in an eminent degree, what we call a Religious Nature; they are very open to Wonder; they have a most keen and curious propensity to inquire into the hidden causes of things, not mere material causes, but Spiritual causes, what we call Metaphysics; the Unseen Universe is to them as to all of us a mystery, but it is a mystery over which they cannot but brood; when education is lacking, this realizing of the unseen is apt to give rise to superst.i.tious feelings, and superst.i.tions still loiter and linger among the glens, the churchyards, and old castles and ruins of Wales, although the spread of Christian 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 Princ.i.p.ality,"

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 a.s.sociation 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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 rehea.r.s.e their pieces, or Minstrels of skill to perform. These a.s.sociation 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 mult.i.tude. 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 a.s.sembled, 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 a.s.sembled 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 ill.u.s.trations, 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 a.s.semblies; "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 a group of Welsh ministers and Welshmen round a pleasant tea-table; we were talking of the Welsh language, and one of our company, who had perhaps done more than any one of his own country for popular Welsh literature, and was one of the order of eminent Welsh preachers of whom we are speaking, broke forth: "Oh!" he said, "you English people cannot see all the things in your Bible that a Welshman can see; now your word '_blessed_,' it seems a very dear sweet thing to an Englishman and to a Welshman, but a Welshman sees the _thing_ in the word, '_Gwyn ei fyd_,'

that is, '_a white world_-white,' literally, white their world; so a Welshman would see there is a '_white world_' for the pure in heart, a '_white world_' for the poor in spirit, a '_white world_' for them who are reviled and persecuted for righteousness' sake; and when you read, '_Blessed_ is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity,' the Welshman reads his Bible and sees there is a '_white world_' for such a one, that is, all sin wiped out, the place quite clean, to begin again."

This is not all. We are not intending to devote any considerable s.p.a.ce to a vindication of the Welsh language, but, when we speak of it with reference to the effects it produces as the vehicle of Oratory, it is necessary to remark that, so far from being,-as many have supposed who have only looked at it in its strange combination of letters on a page, perhaps unable to read it, and never having heard it spoken,-so far from being harsh and rugged, coa.r.s.e or guttural, it probably yields to no language in delicious softness, in melting sweetness; in this it has been likened to the Italian language by those who have been best able to judge. Lord Lyttleton, in his "Letters from Wales," says, that when he first pa.s.sed some of the Welsh hills, and heard the harp and the beautiful female peasants accompanying it with their melodious voices, he could not help indulging in the idea that he had descended the Alps, and was enjoying the harmonious pleasures of the Italian Paradise. And as we have already said, there has long prevailed an idea that the Welsh language is a mult.i.tude of consonants; but indeed the reverse is the case; the learned Eliezer Williams says, in his "Historical Anecdotes of the Welsh Language," "The alphabet itself demonstrates that the charge of a multiplicity of consonants is fallacious, since, whether the number of letters be reckoned twenty-two or twenty-four, seven are vowels; there remain therefore a more inconsiderable number than most of the European languages are obliged to admit ... . _Y_ and _w_ are considered as vowels, and sounded as such; _w_ is p.r.o.nounced like _o u_ in French in the word _oui_." To persons ignorant of the language, how strange is the appearance, and how erroneous the idea of the sound to be conveyed by _dd_, _ll_, _ch_, but indeed all these are indications of the softening of the letter; in a word, the impressions entertained of the harshness of the language are altogether erroneous.

The supposition that the Welsh language is made up of consonants is more especially singular from the fact that it possesses, says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, what perhaps no other nation has,-a poem of eight lines in which there is not a single consonant. These verses are very old, dating from the seventeenth century;-of course the reader will remember that the Welsh language has seven vowels, both _w_ and _y_ being considered and sounded as such. This epigram or poem is on the Spider, and originally stood thus,-

"O'i wiw wy i weu e a;-o'i iau Ei wyau a wea, E wywa ei we aua, A'i weau yw ieuau ia."

To this, the great Gronwy Owen added a kind of counter change of vowels, and the translation has been given as follows:-

"From out its womb it weaves with care Its web beneath the roof; Its wintry web it spreadeth there- Wires of ice its woof.

"And doth it weave against the wall Thin ropes of ice on high?

And must its little liver all The wondrous stuff supply?"

A singular ill.u.s.tration of the vowel power in a language ignorantly supposed to possess no vowels.

And these remarks are not at all unnecessary, for they ill.u.s.trate to the reader, unacquainted with the language, the way in which it becomes such a means of immediate emotion; its words start before the eye like pictures, but are conveyed to the mind like music; and yet the bony character of the language, to which we have referred before, adds to the picture dramatic action and living strength. What a language, then, is this for a competent orator to play upon,-a man with an imaginative mind, and a fervid and fiery soul! Then is brought into play that element of Welsh preaching, without knowing and apprehending which there would be no possibility of understanding the secret of its great power; it is the "_hwyl_." When the Welsh preacher speaks in his best mood, and with great unction, the highest compliment that can be paid him, the loftiest commendation that can be given, is, that he had the "_hwyl_." "_Hwyl_"

is the Welsh word for the canvas of a ship; and probably the derivation of the meaning is, from the canvas or sails of a ship filled with a breeze: the word for breeze, _awel_, is like it, and is used to denote a similar effect. Some years since, when the most eminent Welsh preacher we have recently seen in England, at an ordination service, was addressing his nephew in a crowded church in the neighbourhood of London, he said, "And, my dear boy, remember you are a Welshman; don't try to speak English, and don't try to speak like the English." A great many of his hearers wondered what the good man could mean; but both he and his nephew, and several others of the initiated, very well knew. He meant, speak your words with an _accent_, and an accent formed from a soul giving life and meaning to an expression. This, we know, is what the singer does,-this is what the musician tries to do. All words are not the same words in their meaning; the Welsh preacher seeks to play upon them as keys; the words themselves help him to do so. Literally, they are full of meaning; verbally, he attempts to p.r.o.nounce that meaning; hence, as he rises in feeling he rises in variety of intonation, and his words sway to and fro, up and down,-ba.s.s, minor, and soprano all play their part, a series of intonings. In English, this very frequently sounds monotonous, sometimes even affected; in Welsh, the soul of the man is said to have caught the _hwyl_,-that is, he is in full sail, he has feeling and fire: the people catch it too. A Welsh writer, describing this, quotes the words of Jean Paul Richter: "Pictures during music are seen into more deeply and warmly by spectators; nay, many masters have in creating them acknowledged help from music." Great Welsh preaching, is very often a kind of wild, irregular chant, a jubilant refrain, recurring again and again. The people catch the power of it; shouts rise-prayers!

"_Bendigedig_" ("blessed," or synonymous with our "Bless the Lord!") Amen! "_Diolch byth_!" and other expressions, rise, and roll over the mult.i.tude; they, too, have caught the _hwyl_. It is singular that, with us, the only circ.u.mstances and scenes in which such manifestations can take place, are purely secular, or on the occasions of great public meetings. The Welshman very much estimates the greatness of a preacher by his power to move men; but it does not follow, that this power shall be a.s.sociated with great apparent bodily action. The words of John Elias and Williams of Wern consumed like flames, and divided like swords; but they were men of immense self-possession, and apparently very quiet. It has always been the aim of the greater Welsh preachers to find out such "acceptable"-that is, fitting and piercing-words, so that the words alone shall have the effect of action.

But, in any account of Welsh preaching, the place ought never to be forgotten-the scenery. We have said, the country is losing, now, many of its old characteristics of solitude and isolation; the railways are running along at the foot of the tall mountains, and spots, which we knew thirty years since as hamlets and villages, have now grown into large towns. It has often been the case, that populations born and reared amidst remote mountain solitudes, have possessed strong religious susceptibilities. The Welshman's chapel was very frequently reared in the midst of an unpeopled district, likely to provoke wonder in the mind of the pa.s.sing stranger, as to whence it could derive its congregation.

The building was erected there because it was favourable to a confluence of neighbourhoods. Take a region near to the spot where Christmas Evans was born,-a wild, mountainous tract of country, lying between the counties Brecon and Cardigan; for long miles, in every direction, there are no human habitations,-only, perhaps, here and there, in a deep dingle, some lone house, the residence of a sheep farmer, with three or four cultivated fields in its immediate neighbourhood; and at some distance, on the slopes of the mountain, an occasional shepherd's hut.

It is a scene of the wildest magnificence. The traveller, as he pa.s.ses along, discerns nothing but a sea of mountains,-rugged and precipitous bluffs, and precipices innumerable; here the grand and sportive streams, the Irvon, the Towy, and the Dothia, spring from their rocky channels, and tumble along, rushing and gurgling with deafening roar; here, as you pa.s.s along, you encounter more than one or two "wolves' leaps;"-dark caverns are there, from whence these brotherly rivers rush into each other's embrace. These regions, when we were in the habit of crossing them, many years since,-and we often crossed them,-we very naturally regarded as the Highlands, the sequestered mountain retreats, of Wales; this was Twm Shon Catty's, the Welsh Rob Roy's, country; for let Scotland boast as she will-

"Wales has had a thief as good, She has her own Rob Roy."

And wonderfully romantic is the story of this same Welsh gentleman, and predatory chieftain. Here you find, to this day, his cave, from whence the bold and humorous outlaw was wont to spring forth, to spread terror and rapine over the whole region. It is thirty years since we pa.s.sed through these desolations; they are probably much the same now as they were then; let the traveller shout as he will as he pa.s.ses along, it is not from any human being, it is only from the wild rock, or screaming bird, he will have a reply.

Now, what do our readers think of a large and commodious chapel in the midst of a wild region like this? But one there is, in the very heart of the wilderness. Up to this place the worshippers come, on Sabbath mornings, from distances varying from two to eight miles. It is a Calvinistic-Methodist chapel; and the Rev. William Williams, in his interesting little historical sketch of Welsh Calvinistic-Methodism, tells how he preached in this building, several years since, when the chapel was crowded with worshippers; and in the yard adjoining, between fifty and sixty ponies, which had borne the worshippers to the place, with or without vehicles, were waiting the time for the return journey.

This building had its birth from a congregation gathered first in one of the farm houses in these inaccessible wilds, in 1847. It seems strange to think how far people will travel to Divine Service when they have no such service near their own doors. We were struck with this, a short time since, in Norway; we found our way to a little village church, and there, on a spot where was next to no population, we found the Lutheran church crowded; and outside, a large square s.p.a.ce thronged with carioles, ancient old shandydan landaus, carts, and every kind of conveyance,-horses and ponies stabled in the sheds all round; and we learned that many of the congregation had travelled in this way, beside the numbers who had walked, twelve, sixteen, eighteen miles to the service.

And thus, also, in Wales, many were the long and weary miles usually traversed, and through every variety of weather; and it seemed to be usually thought that the service, or services, repaid all the toil. And there was very little, externally, to aid the imagination, or to charm the taste, either in the building itself, or in the ritual adopted;-all was of the plainest and most severe order. The building, no doubt, was little more than a shelter from the weather; generally, perhaps, huge and capacious,-that was necessary,-but it was quite unadorned; the minister had nothing in the way of robes or attire to aid the impressions of reverence; there was no organ,-usually no instrument of any description,-although if an entire stranger to the language had entered, and heard the long, low, plaintive wail of almost any of their hymns,-most of them seeming to express a kind of dirge-like feeling of an exiled, conquered, and trampled people, a tone with its often-renewed refrain, its long-drawn minor, now sobbing into grief, occasionally swelling into triumph,-he might have found the notes of an organ were not needed to compel the unexpected tear. An exiled, conquered, and trampled people,-that expresses a great deal of truth. Wales has wrongs quite as bitter as any which Ireland ever knew;-the very cause of the existence of most of her chapels arose from the fact that, in many of her parish churches, not a word of Welsh was spoken; and perhaps frequently their ministers could not speak the native language;-the very judges who dispensed justice from the Bench were usually English, and needed an interpreter, that they might be able to understand the case upon which they were to give a judgment. Wales has had very little for which to thank England, but her people have never been seditious. Pious, industrious people, with their simple amus.e.m.e.nts and weird superst.i.tions, and blossoming out into their great religious revivals and reformations, they have had to thank themselves, chiefly, for all the good which has unfolded itself upon their soil. These circ.u.mstances, however, have no doubt aided their peculiar and isolated religious life.

But, in those great a.s.semblies, the a.s.sociation meetings to which we have referred, many of the great preachers stood, with their vast congregations round them, in Nature's open Cathedral. Christmas Evans preached many of his n.o.blest sermons amidst the imposing ruins of Caerphilly, Pembroke, and Man.o.bear Castles; or the preacher found himself with his audience on the slope of some sweet, gorse-covered hill, in the neighbourhood of tumbling torrents, which did not sing so loudly in their melody as to interfere with the sweet restfulness of the surrounding scene. Preachers and hearers were accustomed to plain living,-one of the most essential conditions of high thinking; neither of them knew anything of luxury; and when most of them spoke, the age of luxury, even with us, had not yet set in. Bread and milk, or oatmeal and milk, were the favourite diet of all, in those days; even tea was all but unknown, and the potato almost their nearest approach to a dainty dish. They lived on good terms with Nature, with whom we have been quarrelling now for some years past; and thus they were prepared to receive such lessons as Nature might give, to aid and ill.u.s.trate the deeper lessons of Divine Grace.

Of course, there was considerable uncertainty about the services,-excepting those more imposing and important occasions; and this gave, very frequently, a tone of the ludicrous to their announcement of the services. Thus, if a stranger asked what time the service would commence, it would often have been quite impossible to get any information; and failures, says Mr. D. M. Evans, were so frequent, that the announcement was often made with perfect gravity, "- will be here next Sunday, if he comes." Mr. Evans continues, that he well knew a deacon who claimed the prerogative to make announcements to the congregation, but who every week was guilty of such blunders, that he was implored to resign the honour to some other brother; to which he indignantly replied, that it was his crown, and was he not told in Scripture, "Hold fast that which thou hast, that no man take thy crown"?

Often, when the preacher appeared, he showed himself in the pulpit almost out of breath, sometimes in sad disarray, sometimes apparently as if smothered with wrappers and top-coats; and by his panting and puffing, as someone said, "seeming to show that G.o.d Almighty had asked him to preach the Gospel, but had given him no time for it."

In a word, it is impossible, knowing Wales as we know it in our own day, to form any very distinct idea of the country as it was when these great preachers arose; and, when the tides of a new spiritual life rolled over the Princ.i.p.ality, the singular relics of even heathenish superst.i.tion were loitering still among the secluded valleys and mountains of the land. No doubt, the proclamation of the Gospel, and the elevated faith which its great truths bring in its train, broke the fascination, the charm, and power of many of these; but they lingered even until within the last forty or fifty years,-indeed, the superst.i.tion of the Sin-Eater is said to {23} linger even now in the secluded vale of Cwm-Aman, in Caermarthenshire. The meaning of this most singular inst.i.tution of superst.i.tion was, that when a person died, the friends sent for the Sin-Eater of the district, who, on his arrival, placed a plate of salt and bread on the breast of the deceased person; he then uttered an incantation over the bread, after which, he proceeded to eat it,-thereby eating the sins of the dead person; this done, he received a fee of two-and-sixpence,-which, we suppose, was much more than many a preacher received for a long and painful service. Having received this, he vanished as swiftly as possible, all the friends and relatives of the departed aiding his exit with blows and kicks, and other indications of their faith in the service he had rendered. A hundred years since, and through the ages beyond that time, we suppose this curious superst.i.tion was everywhere prevalent.

Another odd custom was the manner in which public opinion expressed itself on account of any domestic or social delinquency. A large crowd a.s.sembled before the house of the delinquent, one of whom was dressed up in what seemed to be a horse's head; the crowd then burst forth into strong vituperative abuse, accompanying the execrations with the rough music of old kettles, marrow-bones, and cleavers; finally, the effigy of the sinner was burnt before the house, and the sacred wrath of the mult.i.tude appeased. The majesty of outraged opinion being vindicated, they dispersed.

Some superst.i.tions were of a more gentle character; the fairies, or "little men in green," as they were popularly called, continued to hold their tenantry of Wales long after they had departed from England; and even Glamorganshire, one of the counties nearest to England,-its roads forming the most considerable highway through Wales,-was, perhaps, the county where they lingered last; certainly not many years have pa.s.sed by since, in the Vale of Neath, in the same county, there would have been a fear in taking some secluded pathway in the night, lest the "little people" should be offended by the intrusion upon their haunts.

With all these singular observances and superst.i.tions, there was yet a kind of Christian faith prevalent among the people, but buried beneath dark ignorance and social folly. At Christmas time, at night, it was usual to illuminate all the churches in the villages. And upon the New Year's morning, children came waking the dawning, knocking at the doors,-usually obtaining admittance,-when they proceeded to sprinkle the furniture with water, singing as they did so the following words, which we quote on account of their quaint, sweet, old-world simplicity:-