I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.
"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
You use incense now?"
The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.
"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
church. I should not venture to do so."
"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
been sung there, and--"
He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
that struck me almost with awe.
"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
Hezekiah, _ffeiriad coch yr Castletown_--the Red Priest of
Castletown--was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
that has been done here."
I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.
But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
incense and odours of paradise.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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