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
The society he enjoyed was, probably, more cultivated, small as was the
village, than that by which he had been surrounded in Anglesea; from all
the inhabitants, and from the neighbourhood, he received marks of great
respect; it was, probably, felt, generally, that, by some singular turn
of affairs, a great man, a national man, a man of the Principality, had
settled in their midst. And he always after, and when he had left,
remembered this brief period of his life with deep gratitude. He was
more able to borrow books: here, for the first time, he read a work,
which was regarded as a mighty book in that day, Dr. Pye Smith’s
“Scripture Testimony to the Messiah;” he read it with intense eagerness,
incorporating many of its valuable criticisms into his sermons, and,
especially, making them the subjects of ordinary conversation. Rhys
Stephen says, “I remember listening to him with wonder, when, in
conversation with Mr. Saunders, of Merthyr, he gave the substance of Dr.
Pye Smith’s criticism on John xvii. 3. And I distinctly remember, that
when Mr. Evans said, ‘Mr. Saunders, you will observe that, on these
grounds, the knowledge of Jesus Christ, here mentioned, is the same
knowledge as that of the only true God, and that the knowledge of the
former is as necessary to salvation, as the knowledge of the
latter—indeed, they are one, and the same thing,’ ‘Yes, yes,’ was the
reply; ‘capital, very excellent. I never heard that interpretation
before.’ I was then a youth, and was not astonished by the
interpretation, which, of course, was new to me, so much as by the
admissions of the aged men that it was new to them.” At any rate, it
illustrates the avidity with which this mind still pursued the rays of
light, from book to book, from conversation to conversation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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