Rowlands had the power of the thunder, and the dew; he pressed an extraordinary vitality into words, which had often been heard before, so that once, while reading the Church Service, in his own church, he gave such a dreadful tenderness to the words, “By thine agony, and bloody sweat!” that the service was almost stopped, and the people broke forth into a passion of feeling. Christmas Evans says: “While Rowlands was preaching, the fashion of his countenance became altered; his voice became as if inspired; the worldly, dead, and careless spirit was cast out by his presence. The people, as it were, drew near to the cloud, towards Christ, and Moses, and Elijah. Eternity, with its realities, rushed upon their vision. These mighty influences were felt, more or less, for fifty years. Thousands gathered at Llangeitho for communion every month, and they came there from every county in Wales.”
Such power there is in human words when divinely wielded; such was the spiritual power of Daniel Rowlands. Well does one writer say, the story of Llangeitho, well written, would read like a chapter in religious romance. It is very doubtful whether we have the record of any other man who drew such numbers to the immediate circle of his ministry, as Rowlands. He did not itinerate so largely as most of the great Welsh preachers. In an obscure spot in the interior of Cardiganshire, in an age of bad roads, and in a neighbourhood where the roads were especially bad, he addressed his immense concourses of people. His monthly communion was sometimes attended by as many as three thousand communicants, of whom, often, many were clergymen. Upwards of a hundred ministers ascribe to him the means of their conversion. Thus, in his day, it was a place of pilgrimages; and even now, there are not a few who turn aside, to stand, with wonder, upon the spot where Rowlands exercised his marvellous ministry.
The four great Welsh preachers, Christmas Evans, John Elias, Williams of Wern, and Davies of Swansea, on whose pulpit powers, and method, we have more distinctly dilated, may be styled the tetrarchs of the pulpit of Wild Wales of these later times. Their eminence was single, and singular. Their immense powers unquestioned: rivals, never, apparently, by their own selection, the great Welsh religious mind only rivalled them with each other. After them it might be said, “Great was the company of preachers,”—great, not merely in number, carrying also influence, and usefulness of another kind; perhaps even superior to those honoured names.
How, for instance, can we do sufficient honour to the labours of Charles of Bala? This truly apostolic man was born at Llanvihangel, in 1755. While yet a boy, he managed to introduce family worship into his father’s house; but it was in his eighteenth year that he heard the great Daniel Rowlands preach, and he says: “From that day I found a new heaven, and a new earth, to enjoy; the change experienced by a blind man, on receiving his sight, is not greater than that which I felt on that day.” In his twentieth year he went to Oxford, and received Deacon’s orders, and was appointed to a curacy in Somersetshire; he took his degree at his University, but he could never obtain priest’s orders; in every instance objection was made to what was called his Methodism.
The doors of the Establishment were thus closed against him, and he was compelled to cast in his lot with the Welsh Methodists, in 1785. Before this, he had preached for Daniel Rowlands in his far-famed church at Llangeitho, and the great old patriarch simply uttered a prophecy about him when he said, “Mr. Charles is the gift of God to North Wales.” He was an eminent preacher, but it was rather in other ways that he became illustrious, in the great religious labours of his country. Moving about to preach, from place to place, his heart became painfully impressed, and distressed, by the great ignorance of the people everywhere, and that such multitudes were unable to read the Word of God; so he determined on the establishment of schools upon a singular principle.
It was two or three years before he commenced his more settled labours in Wales, that Robert Raikes had originated the Sunday-school idea in Gloucester. Thomas Charles was the first to seize upon the idea, and introduce it into his own country. Charles had an organizing, and administrative, mind; he fixed upon innumerable places, where he settled schoolmasters, for periods of from six to nine, and twelve months, to teach the people to read, giving them the initial elements, and rudiments, of education, and then removing these masters to another locality.
So he filled the country with schools—Sabbath, and night-schools. He visited the schools himself, periodically, catechizing the children publicly; and in the course of his lifetime, he had the satisfaction of seeing the aspect of things entirely changed. He used no figure of speech, when, towards the close of his life, he said, “The desert blossoms as the rose, and the dry land has become streams of water.” To these purposes of his heart he was able to devote whatever money he received from the work of the ministry; he testifies affectionately that “the wants of my own family were provided for by the industry of my dear wife;” and he received some help by donations from England. He found, everywhere, a dearth of Bibles, and it is curious to read that, although the Church of England would not receive him as one of her ministers, when his work became established, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge made him, after considerable reluctance, a grant of no less than ten thousand Welsh Bibles. After this, he went to London, for the purpose of establishing a Society to supply Wales with the Holy Scriptures. It was at a meeting of the Religious Tract Society, which was called together for that purpose, that it was resolved to establish the British and Foreign Bible Society; and before that society had been established ten years, it had supplied Wales with a hundred thousand copies of the Word of God.
Other men were great preachers, but Thomas Charles was, in the truest sense of the word, a bishop, an overseer,—travelling far, and wide, preaching, catechizing, administrating, placing and removing labourers. All his works, and words, his inward, and his outward life, show the active, high-toned saintliness, and enthusiastic holiness, of the man. There is, perhaps, no other to whom Wales is so largely indebted for the giving direction, organization, and usefulness to all religious labour, as to him. His modesty transcended his gifts, and his activity. John Campbell, of Kingsland, himself noted in all the great, and good works of that time, relates that at a meeting, at Lady Anne Erskine’s, at which Mr. Charles was requested to state the circumstances which had made little Bala a kind of spiritual metropolis of the Principality of Wales, “he spoke for about an hour, and never once mentioned himself, although he was the chief instrument, and actor, in the whole movements which had made the place so eminent.”
This good man, John Campbell, afterwards wrote to Mr. Charles’s biographer: “I never was at Bala but once, which was not long after his removal to the regions of immortality; and such was my veneration for his character, and labours, that, in approaching it, I felt as if I was about coming in sight of Sinai, or Jerusalem, or treading on classical ground. The events of his life, I believe, are viewed with more interest by the glorified than the battles of Actium, or Waterloo.”
But, as a preacher, he was unlike those men, whose words moved upon the wheels of thunder, and who seemed to deal with the lightnings of imagination, and eloquence. As we read his words, they seem to flow with refreshing sweetness. He was waited for, and followed everywhere, but his utterances had nothing of the startling powers we have seen; we should think he preached, rather, to those who knew, by experience, what it is to grow in grace. There is a glowing light of holiness about his words—a deep, sweet, experimental reality. Of course, being a Welshman, his thoughts were pithily expressed. They were a sort of spiritual proverbs, in which he turned over, again and again, some idea, until it became like the triads of his country’s literature; and dilating upon an idea, the various aspects of it became like distinct facets, setting forth some pleasant ray.