These mountains and vales and creeks and bays, the refuge of the ancient inhabitants retreating before the invader, have retained, even in their very names and forms, a poetic inspiration which has elsewhere passed away.
The four Welsh dioceses each of them speak of this poetic, mystic past. That marvellous cathedral of St. David’s, in its secluded basin at the very extremity of the land, shut out from the world and enclosed as within a natural sanctuary, with its craggy coast and headland and island and glistening shore and purple cliff, every spring and bay and inlet teeming with some strange legend of those primitive days of David and Nun and Lily; or, again, that lovely cathedral of St. Teilo, on the banks of the Taff, in its green vale, with its crystal stream and its solemn yews; or, again, that lesser cathedral of St. Asaph, founded by the most romantic of all the saints of the Celtic race of the north—the darling Mungo of the Scottish nation—founded as he wandered to and from his own Glasgow on the Clyde; or, again, this diocese in which we are now assembled, with Snowdon as the guardian mount that stands round about its small Jerusalem, this ancient refuge of the Druids and Bards of old from the Roman conqueror, this Holy Mount of the Holy Island of Mona, stretching out its arms to the neighbouring shore of Ireland, another Isle of Saints:—Look at all these ancient sanctuaries, east and west, north and south. Look at the rock from which we were hewn and the deep pit from which we were digged. Despise not these feelings which God by a thousand marks has stamped with His own peculiar approval. Cherish these venerable ruins and monuments of early times.
There is a legend which tells us that if we take a clod of turf from St. David’s churchyard, and stand upon it by the shore of that western sea, we shall see rising in the distant waters the green islands of the fairies, the vision of a land, not indeed of heaven, but still not of this earth. It is by taking our stand on that old British soil that we can catch for ourselves a glimpse of a higher, more romantic, ideal world than any other part of English history can show. The Bards, indeed, themselves have perished—
Cold is Cadwallo’s tongue
That hush’d the stormy main;
Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed;
Mountains, ye mourn in vain
Modred, whose magic song
Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topt head.
But the world which they created still lives in that marvellous cycle of legends which gather round the name of King Arthur, and which, in our own day, has given to the first of our living poets the worthiest subject which our island could furnish—the career of the stainless king and his gallant knights, which our children and our children’s children will read with their souls more and more raised to nobler and higher thoughts. The rocks and seas on which we look from Holyhead—“the shaggy top of Mona high,”—the wide bay “where Deva spreads her wizard stream,” inspired in Milton some of his wildest and most pathetic strains in speaking of his loved companion Lycidas, who was lost off these very coasts. The solid prosaic sense of the Saxon is necessary; the energy and enterprise of the Norman is useful; have been indispensable to the greatness of Britain; but do not forget the romance and the song and the sentiment of the mountains and the minstrels of Wales. Leave a corner in your minds for the visions of other days. Remember that there are things in heaven and earth more than our plain homely English philosophy has dreamed of. Such innocent, beautiful stories and thoughts, from whatever quarter they come, though not in themselves religious, yet smooth and purify the course of life. They prepare us for the poetry of parables like the Pilgrim’s Progress—they prepare us for the poetry of the Psalms and of the Prophets of the Bible. As these mountains, these bays, these rocks, which gave to us in their early days our poetic and romantic thoughts, have, in these later days, given to us our quarries and our harbours and our lighthouses and our piers, so it is that out of every generous and inspiring thought there may come at last the most solid, the most useful, the most comprehensive materials of God’s glory and man’s usefulness.
(2) There is another aspect of this element in the national character of the old Celtic races.
I have said that the names of the old Welsh saints remind us of the antique poetic phase of the national British Church. But they also remind us of its devotional emotions and fervent enthusiasm. We know but little of St. Cybi or St. Seiriol—those gaunt hermits, wrapped up in shaggy goat-skins, with their sacred bells and their favourite animals. But we know thus much—that they were amongst the enthusiastic spirits who appeared in those dark times to keep up by a strange unearthly presence the sense of things unseen. And such as they were, with their childish visions and their solitary musings, such was the old British Church altogether—hardly ever leaving a permanent impression on the great practical world without, though producing now and then a holy prelate like St. David, now and then a holy anchorite like St. Cybi, now and then a holy heresiarch like Pelagius. And so in later times, the same passionate religious sentiment has shown itself in the fervour with which the Welsh people received the ministrations and the influence of John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the affection with which they clung to the hymns of their own rude Methodist poets. Amidst much folly and much obstinacy and much waywardness, all honour to those old saints who achieved what the Norman prelates could not achieve,—to those Methodist teachers who reached classes which perhaps could not have been reached by better and wiser men.
Such enthusiasm is not sufficient by itself to produce true religion; it is compatible with a very imperfect morality and a very low stage of Christianity. Still it belongs to the great central fires which keep the human soul alive, and it has in various forms been God’s special gift to the Celtic races of mankind, especially in this country. If we were to remove it out of our national existence England would not be the great nation that she now is, and the English Church would lose one powerful means of raising the spiritual energies of the people. “Prove all things,” says the Apostle, and “hold fast that which is good”; but in the same breath, he says, “Quench not the spirit,” “Despise not prophesyings.” Quench not enthusiasm, despise not strong emotions: labour only to turn them into proper channels, so that they may help to make men more pure and more truthful—more near to God, more like to Christ. It is not only in the worship and teaching of our country that this enthusiasm shows itself. Listen to the account of the gallant deeds of Welsh soldiers, in the letter of an English officer writing to a friend, [32] describing the defence of Rorke’s Drift:—
“Private John Williams was posted, together with Private Joseph Williams and Private William Harrison, in a further ward of the hospital. They held it for more than an hour—so long as they had a round of ammunition left.
“When communication was for a time cut off, the Zulus were enabled to advance and burst open the door. A hand-to-hand conflict then ensued, during which Private Joseph Williams and two of the patients were dragged out and assegaied.
“Whilst the Zulus were occupied with the slaughter of those unfortunate men, a lull took place, which enabled Private John Williams (who with two of the patients were the only men left alive in the ward) to succeed in knocking a hole in the partition and taking the two patients with him into the next ward, where he found Private Henry Hook.
“These two men together, one man working whilst the other fought and held the enemy at bay with his bayonet, broke through three more partitions, and were thus enabled to bring eight more patients through a small window into the inner line of defence.
“In another ward facing the hill Private William Jones and Private Robert Jones had been placed. They defended their post to the last, and till six out of seven patients had been removed.
“Corporal William Allen and Frederick Hitch must also be mentioned. It was chiefly due to their courageous conduct that communication with the hospital was kept up at all, holding together at all costs a most dangerous post, raked in reverse by the enemy’s fire from the hill. They were both severely wounded, but their determined conduct enabled the patients to be withdrawn from the hospital, and when incapacitated by their wounds from fighting, they continued, as soon as their wounds were dressed, to serve out ammunition to their comrades through the night.”
Welshmen all of them.