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
Christmas returned to Lleyn, but not to remain there long. The period of
his ministry in that neighbourhood was about two years, and during that
time the religious spirit of the neighbourhood had been deeply stirred.
It is most likely that the immediate cause which led to his removal may
be traced to the natural feeling that he was fitted for a much more
obvious and extended field of labour. Lleyn was a kind of mission
station, its churches were small, they had long been disorganised, and it
was not likely that, even if they woke at once into newness of life, they
could attain to ideas of liberality and Church order, on which the growth
and advance and perpetuity of the Churches could alone be founded; and
then it was very likely discovered that the man labouring among them
would be demanded for labours very far afield; it is awkward when the
gifts of a man make him eminently acceptable to shine and move as an
evangelist, and yet he is expected to fill the place, and be as steady in
pastoral relations as a pole star!
CHAPTER III.
_THE MINISTRY IN THE ISLAND OF ANGLESEA_.
Journey to Anglesea—Cildwrn Chapel, and Life in the Cildwrn
Cottage—Poverty—Forcing his Way to Knowledge—Anecdote, “I am the
Book”—A Dream—The Sandemanian Controversy—Jones of Ramoth—“Altogether
Wrong”—The Work in Peril—Thomas Jones of Rhydwilym—Christmas’s
Restoration to Spiritual Health—Extracts from Personal
Reflections—Singular Covenant with God—Renewed Success—The Great
Sermon of the Churchyard World—Scenery of its Probable
Delivery—Outline of the Sermon—Remarks on the Allegorical
Style—Outlines of Another Remarkable Sermon, “The Hind of the
Morning”—Great Preaching but Plain Preaching—Hardships of the Welsh
Preacher.
In 1792 Christmas Evans left Lleyn. He speaks of a providential
intimation conveyed to him from the Island of Anglesea; the providential
intimation was a call to serve all the Churches of his order in that
island for seventeen pounds a year! and for the twenty years during which
he performed this service, he never asked for more. He was twenty-six
years of age when he set forth, on his birthday, Christmas Day, for his
new and enlarged world of work. He travelled like an Apostle,—and surely
he travelled in an apostolic spirit,—he was unencumbered with this
world’s goods. It was a very rough day of frost and snow,
“The way was long, the wind was cold.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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