There is also the lesson which all such inquiries bring before us, and which is specially impressed upon us by these early records of the Bible—the advantage of being transported to remote ages and scenes wholly unlike our own. In those stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob there is a freshness as of the dew of the womb of the morning. We feel younger as we read; they refresh us in the weary pilgrimage of life; we catch the early fragrance of the first dawn of the human race. There had been many great epochs and many great men in Israel since the time of Abraham and Sarah: there had been Jacob, or Israel, from whom they derived their name and some of the chief elements of their character; there had been Moses, under whom they had won their freedom and their laws, and Joshua, by whose prowess they had conquered the Promised Land, and David, with all the line of kings and prophets that followed. But still there was a charm about their first ancestor, Abraham, and their first mother, Sarah, which they could find in no later times. There was a delight in seeing the peculiar blessings which they had gained from those old primitive patriarchs, and for which they were to be ever thankful to God, through whom these and all other gifts had come. I. May I take up the Prophet’s words and the lessons of the Book of Genesis, and give them a special application which this day suggests. We are met to celebrate the reopening of one of the most ancient churches of the Welsh people. Most of the building has stood for five hundred years—one aged arch, we are told, for a thousand years. {27} Let us then, Englishmen or Welshmen, who are assembled here, ask, in no spirit of boastfulness or rivalry, but of thankfulness to God, what are the special gifts for good which the British Celtic race has contributed to our common country? As the Israelites had for their ancestors Abraham and Sarah, before their own special patriarch Israel or Jacob—ancestors by whom they were connected with other races besides their own, Edomite, Arabian, Mesopotamian—so we were Britons before we were Englishmen; and we by that Celtic parentage are made one in blood with that old original people which is parent alike to the Welsh, the Irish, the Scottish, and the French nations. What, then, are the best peculiarities of the Welsh people? (1) To the ancient Cambrian British race we owe that distant atmosphere of romance, of sentiment, of poetry, which neither Saxon nor Norman have given or could have given us. These mountains and vales and creeks and bays, the refuge of the ancient inhabitants retreating before the invader, have retained, even in their very names and forms, a poetic inspiration which has elsewhere passed away.