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
becoming serviceable for all that large part of the human family who
speak without thinking. To this state the Welsh can never come. That
unaccommodating tongue only moves with a soul behind it.
Thus, it is not the first reason, but it is not unimportant to remember,
that, until very recently, the pulpit in Wales has been the only means of
popular excitement, instruction, or even of entertainment; until very
recently the Welsh, like the ancient Hebrew lady, have dwelt among their
own people, they have possessed no popular fictions, no published poems,
no published emanations either of metaphysics or natural science; immured
in their own language, as they were, less than a century since, among
their own mountains, their language proved a barrier to the importation
of many works accessible to almost all the other languages of Europe. It
may be said that religion, as represented through the men of the pulpit,
has made Wales what she is. When the first men of the pulpit, Howell
Harris, Daniel Rowlands, and others, arose, they found their country
lying under a night of spiritual darkness, and they effected an amazing
reformation; but then they had no competitive influences to interfere
with their progress, or none beyond that rough, rude sensuality, that
barbarism of character, which everywhere sets itself in an attitude of
hostility to spiritual truth and to elevated holiness; there were no
theatres or race courses, there was no possibility that the minds of the
multitudes should be occupied by the intellectual casuistries of a later
day; Wales possessed no Universities or Colleges, and very few Schools;
on the other hand, there were some characteristics of the national mind
very favourable to the impulse these men gave, and the impressions they
produced. So it has happened that the Welsh preacher has been elevated
into an importance, reminding us of the Welsh tradition concerning St.
David, the patron saint of Wales, regarding whom it is said, that, while
preaching in the year 520, in Cardigan, against the Pelagian heresy, such
was the force of his argument, and the eloquence of his oratory, that the
very ground on which he stood rose beneath his feet and elevated itself
into a hillock; and there, in after ages, a church was erected upon the
spot to which awful tradition pointed as the marvellous pulpit of the
patron saint.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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