If any other consideration than a deep affection for this dear old man and repentance for his unwise ebullitions of Free Thought had guided David in the matter it was an utter detestation of the services and the influence of the Calvinist Chapel in the village, the Little Bethel, presided over by Pastor Prytherch, a fanatical blacksmith, who alternated spells of secret drunkenness and episodes of animalism by orgies of self-abasement, during which he--in half-confessing his own lapses--attributed freely and unrebukedly the same vices to the male half of his overflowing congregation. These out-pourings--"Pechadur truenus wyf i! Arglwydd madden i mi!"--extempore prayers, psalms chanted with a swaying of the body, hymns sung uproariously, scripture read with an accompaniment of groans, hysteric laughter, and interjections of assent, and a rambling discourse--lasting fully an hour, were in the Welsh language; and David on his three or four visits--and it can be imagined what a sensation _they_ caused! The Vicar's son--himself perhaps about to confess his sins!--understood very little of the subject matter, save from the extravagant gestures of the participants. But he soon made up his mind that religion for religion, that expressed by the English--"Well, father, you are right--the 'British'"--Church in Wales was many hundred times superior in reasonableness and stability to the negroid ebullitions of the Calvinists. As a matter of fact they were scarcely more followers of the reformer Calvin than they were of Ignatius Loyola; it was just a symptomatic outbreak of some prehistoric Iberian, Silurian form of worship, something deeply planted in the soil of Wales, something far older than Druidism, something contemporary with the beliefs of Neolithic days. Eighteen years ago, much of Wales was as enslaved by whiskey as are still Keltic Scotland, Keltiberian Ireland, Lancashire, London and wicked little Kent. It was only saved from going under completely by decennial religious revivals, which for three months or so were followed by total abstinence and a fierce-eyed continence.