Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporaries — John Shaqi
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
He travelled on horseback, with his wife behind him; and he arrived on
the evening of the same day at Llangefni. On his arrival in Anglesea he
found ten small Baptist Societies, lukewarm and faint; what amount of
life there was in them was spent in the distraction of theological
controversy, which just then appeared to rage, strong and high, among the
Baptists in North Wales. He was the only minister amongst those
Churches, and he had not a brother minister to aid him within a hundred
and fifty miles; but he commenced his labours in real earnest, and one of
his first movements was to appoint a day of fasting and prayer in all the
preaching places; he soon had the satisfaction to find a great revival,
and it may with truth be said “the pleasure of the Lord prospered in his
hand.”
Llangefni appears to have been the spot in Anglesea where Christmas found
his home. Llangefni is a respectable town now; when the preaching
apostle arrived there, near a hundred years since, its few scattered
houses did not even rise to the dignity of a village. Cildwrn Chapel was
here the place of his ministrations, and here stood the little cottage
where Christmas and his wife passed their plain and simple days. Chapel
and cottage stood upon a bleak and exposed piece of ground. The cottage
has been reconstructed since those days, but upon the site of the queer
and quaint old manse stands now a far more commodious chapel-keeper’s
house. As in the Bedford vestry they show you still the chair in which
John Bunyan sat, so here they show a venerable old chair, Christmas
Evans’s chair, in the old Cildwrn cottage; it is deeply and curiously
marked by the cuttings of his pocket-knife, made when he was indulging in
those reveries and daydreams in which he lived abstracted from everything
around him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account