The doors of the Establishment were thus closed against him, and he was compelled to cast in his lot with the Welsh Methodists, in 1785. Before this, he had preached for Daniel Rowlands in his far-famed church at Llangeitho, and the great old patriarch simply uttered a prophecy about him when he said, “Mr. Charles is the gift of God to North Wales.” He was an eminent preacher, but it was rather in other ways that he became illustrious, in the great religious labours of his country. Moving about to preach, from place to place, his heart became painfully impressed, and distressed, by the great ignorance of the people everywhere, and that such multitudes were unable to read the Word of God; so he determined on the establishment of schools upon a singular principle. It was two or three years before he commenced his more settled labours in Wales, that Robert Raikes had originated the Sunday-school idea in Gloucester. Thomas Charles was the first to seize upon the idea, and introduce it into his own country. Charles had an organizing, and administrative, mind; he fixed upon innumerable places, where he settled schoolmasters, for periods of from six to nine, and twelve months, to teach the people to read, giving them the initial elements, and rudiments, of education, and then removing these masters to another locality. So he filled the country with schools—Sabbath, and night-schools. He visited the schools himself, periodically, catechizing the children publicly; and in the course of his lifetime, he had the satisfaction of seeing the aspect of things entirely changed. He used no figure of speech, when, towards the close of his life, he said, “The desert blossoms as the rose, and the dry land has become streams of water.” To these purposes of his heart he was able to devote whatever money he received from the work of the ministry; he testifies affectionately that “the wants of my own family were provided for by the industry of my dear wife;” and he received some help by donations from England. He found, everywhere, a dearth of Bibles, and it is curious to read that, although the Church of England would not receive him as one of her ministers, when his work became established, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge made him, after considerable reluctance, a grant of no less than ten thousand Welsh Bibles. After this, he went to London, for the purpose of establishing a Society to supply Wales with the Holy Scriptures. It was at a meeting of the Religious Tract Society, which was called together for that purpose, that it was resolved to establish the British and Foreign Bible Society; and before that society had been established ten years, it had supplied Wales with a hundred thousand copies of the Word of God.