“Perhaps,” he said, “it is best it should be so, for I am more able to bear the blow. But,” he continued, “do you long to see the end of the journey?”
“Oh, from my heart!” she replied.
“But why?”
“Because I shall see so many of my old friends, and my mother; and, above all, I shall see Jesus.”
“Ah, well, then,” he said, “tell them I am coming! tell them I am coming!”
She died first. Her last words were, “Peace! peace!” He followed her shortly after—on the 17th of March, 1840, in the fifty-ninth year of his age.
Amongst the great preachers of Wales, not one seems to have won more upon the tender love of those who knew him. Dr. Raffles said of him, “What he was as a preacher, I can only gather from the effects he produced on those who understood the language in which he spoke, but I can truly say, that every occasion on which I saw him only served to impress me more with the ardour of his piety, and the kindness of his heart. He was one of the loveliest characters it has been my lot to meet.”
High strains of thought, rendered into the sweet variety, melting tenderness, and the grand strength of the language of Wales, seem to have been the characteristics of the preaching of Williams of Wern; tender, and terrible, sweetness alternating with strength. We have already said how much Welsh preaching derived, in its greatest men, from the power of varying accent; the reader may conceive it himself if ever listening to that wonderful chorus in Handel’s “Messiah,” which Herder, the great German, called truly the Christian Epos; but the chorus to which we refer, is that singular piece of varying pictorial power, “Unto us a Child is born,” repeated, again and again, in sweet whispered accents, playing upon the thought; the shepherds having kept watch over their flocks by night in the fields, and having heard the revelation voices of the angels say it—“For unto us a Child is born;” and then rolls in the grand thunder, “And His name shall be called Wonderful;” and then, you return back to the sweet silvery accents, “For unto us a Child is born;” and the thought is, that the Wise Men are there offering their gifts; and then roll in, again, the grand, overwhelming words, “And His name shall be called Wonderful;” and yet again that for which we waited, the tender, silvery whisperings, “Unto us a Child is born;” until it seems as if flocks, and herds, and fields, shepherds, and wise men, all united with the family of Jesus, beneath the song-singing through the heavens in the clear starry night, “Unto us a Child is born, and His name shall be called Wonderful.” Those who have listened to this chorus, may form some idea of the way in which a great Welsh preacher—and Williams of Wern as a special illustration—would run his thought, and its corresponding expression, up and down, through various tones of feeling, and with every one awaken, on some varying accent, a fresh interpretation, and expression. Perhaps, the nearest approach we have heard, in England, to the peculiar gifts of this preacher, has been in the happiest moods of the beloved, and greatly honoured Thomas Jones, once minister of Bedford Chapel, London.
CHAPTER VI.
CONTEMPORARIES—JOHN ELIAS.
Fire and Smoke—Elias’s Pure Flame—Notes in the Pulpit—Carrying Fire in Paper—Elias’s Power in Apostrophe—Anecdote of the Flax-dresser—A Singular First Appearance in the Pulpit—A Rough Time in Wales—The Burning of the Ravens’ Nests—A Hideous Custom put down—The Great Fair of Rhuddlan—The Ten Cannon of Sinai—Action in Oratory—The Tremendous Character of his Preaching—Lives in an Atmosphere of Prayer—Singular Dispersion on a Racecourse—A Remarkable Sermon, Shall the Prey be taken from the Mighty?—Anecdote of a Noble Earl—Death and Funeral.