{94} This paragraph is one of the celebrated “Specimens of Welsh Preaching,” printed in England some years before the publication of any of these sermons. We give the first English version verbatim. Ed. {114} The substance of this transcendent passage Christmas Evans often repeated in his preaching, and of course with considerable variation on different occasions. There are two other versions of it in English. One of them, translated many years ago, and published under the title of “A Specimen of Welsh Preaching,” has been everywhere justly admired, as one of the finest productions of sanctified genius. The other, which we give below, was taken from the lips of the preacher, and rendered into English, by one of his frequent hearers and intimate friends. “All the stores of his energy,” says the editor of the English memoir, “and the resources of his voice, which was one of great compass, depth, and sweetness, seemed reserved for the closing portions of the picture, when he delineated the routed and battered hosts of the pit retreating from the cross, where they had anticipated a triumph, and met a signal and irretrievable overthrow.”—EDITOR. * * * * * “Methinks I find myself standing upon the summit of one of the highest of the everlasting hills, permitted thence to take a survey of our earth. It shows to me a wide and far-spread burial-ground, over which lie scattered in countless multitudes the wretched and perishing children of Adam. The ground is full of hollow’s, the yawning caverns of death, while over it broods a thick cloud of fearful darkness. No light from above shines upon it, nor is the ray of the sun or moon, or the beams of a candle seen through all its borders. It is walled around. Its gates, large and massive, ten thousand times stronger than all the gates of brass forged among men, are one and all safely locked. It is the hand of Divine Justice that has locked them, and so firmly secured are the strong bolts which hold those doors, that all the created powers even of the heavenly world, were they to labor to all eternity, could not drive so much as one of them back. How hopeless the wretchedness to which the race are doomed, and into what irrecoverable depths of ruin has the disobedience of their first parent plunged them!