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 amusements and weird superstitions, 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 circumstances, however, have no doubt aided their peculiar and isolated religious life. But, in those great assemblies, the Association 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 noblest sermons amidst the imposing ruins of Caerphilly, Pembroke, and Manobear 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 illustrate the deeper lessons of Divine Grace.