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
beautifully even if success should never come.
At Lleyn, Christmas Evans tasted the first prelibations of a successful
ministry; a wondrous power attended his preaching, numbers were gathered
into the Church. “I could scarcely believe,” he says, “the testimony of
the people who came before the Church as candidates for membership, that
they were converted through my ministry; yet I was obliged to believe,
though it was marvellous in my eyes. This made me thankful to God, and
increased my confidence in prayer; a delightful gale descended upon me as
from the hill of the New Jerusalem, and I felt the three great things of
the kingdom of heaven, righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy
Ghost.” Indeed, very unusual powers seemed to attend him. He says, “I
frequently preached out of doors at nightfall,” and the singing, and the
praising seem to have touched him very tenderly; he frequently found his
congregations bathed in tears and weeping profusely. Preaching was now
to him, as he testifies, a very great pleasure,—and no wonder; quite a
remarkable revival of religious feeling woke up wherever he went. When
he first entered Lleyn, the religious life was very cold and feeble;
quite wonderful was the change.
After a time, exhausted with his work in these villages, he accepted an
invitation to visit the more remote parts of South Wales. When
ministers, like Christmas Evans, are enfeebled in health, they recreate
themselves by preaching; the young man was enfeebled, but he started off
on his preaching tour; he could not obtain a horse, so he walked the
whole way, preaching in every village or town through which he passed.
Very frequently large numbers of the same congregation would follow after
him the next day, and attend the services fifteen or twenty times,
although many miles apart. So he went through the counties of Cardigan,
Pembroke, Caernarvon, Glamorgan, Monmouth, and Brecknock, stopping and
holding services at the innumerable villages lying on his way. The fame
that a wonderful man of God had appeared spread through South Wales on
the wings of the wind, and an appointment for Christmas Evans to preach
was sufficient to attract thousands to the place. While he yet continued
at Lleyn as itinerant missionary, in that short time he had acquired
perhaps a greater popularity than any other preacher of that day in
Wales.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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