Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporariesHood, Edwin Paxton
History
Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporaries
Hood, Edwin Paxton
Evans, Christmas, 1766-1838
It is said that all denominations, and all conditions of people, caught
up, and propagated the report, “CHRISTMAS EVANS IS COME!” “_Are you sure
of it_?” “YES, _quite sure of it_; _he preached at Caerphilly last
Sunday_! I know a friend who was there.” These poor scattered
villagers, how foolish, to us, seems their enthusiasm, and frantic joy,
because they had their country’s great preaching bard in their midst;
almost as foolish as those insane Florentines, who burst into tears and
acclamations as they greeted one of the great pictures of Cimabue, and
reverently thronged round it in a kind of triumphal procession. What
makes it more remarkable, is that they should love a man as poor, as he
was old. If they could revere him as, wearied and dusty, he came along
after his tedious two hundred miles’ journey, spent, and exhausted, what
an affluence of affection they would have poured forth had he rode into
Caerphilly, as the old satirist has it, in a coach, and six!
Well, he was settled in the chapel-house, and a housekeeper was provided
for him. In domestic matters, however, he did not seem to get on very
well. North, and South Wales appeared different to him, and he said to a
friend, he must get a servant from the north. It was suggested to him,
that he might do better than that, that he had better marry again, and
the name of an excellent woman was mentioned, who would have been
probably not unwilling; and she had wealth, so that he might have
bettered his entire worldly circumstances by the alliance, and have made
himself pleasantly independent of churches, and deacons, and county
associations; and when it was first suggested to him, he seemed to think
for a moment, and then broke out into a cheerful laugh. “Ho! ho!” he
said, “I tell you, brother, it is my firm opinion that I am never to have
any property in the soil of this world, until I have a grave;” and he
would talk no more on the subject, but he took a good brother minister of
the neighbourhood into his counsel, Mr. Davies, of Argoed, and he
persuaded him to take his horse, and to go for him to Anglesea, and to
bring back with him the old, and faithful servant of himself, and his
departed wife, Mary Evans; and, in a short time, he married her, and she
paid him every tribute of untiring, and devoted affection, to the last
moment of his life. A really foolish man, you see, this Christmas Evans,
and, as many no doubt said, old as he was, he might have done so much
better for himself. It is not uninteresting to notice a circumstance,
which Mr. Rhys Stephen discovered, that Christmas Evans was married the
second time in the same parish of Eglwysilian, in Glamorganshire, the
church in which George Whitefield was married: the parish register
contains both their names.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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