Christmas Evans was born at a place called Esgairwen (Ysgarwen), in the parish of Llandysul, in Cardiganshire; he was born on Christmas Day—and hence his Christian name—in 1766. His parents, Samuel and Johanna Evans, were in the poorest circumstances; his father was a shoemaker, and although this profession has included such a number of men remarkable for their genius and high attainments, it has never found the masters of the craft greatly remarkable for the possession of gold or gear. His mother, by her maiden name Lewis, came from a respectable family of freeholders in the parish; but the father of Christmas died when he was a child,—and these were hard days of poverty, almost destitution, for the poor struggling widow and her family,—so her brother, James Lewis, of Bwlchog, in the parish of Llanfihangel-ar-Arth, took little Christmas home to his farm, engaging to feed and clothe him for such labour on the farm as the poor boy might be able to perform. Here he stayed six years,—six miserable years; his uncle was a hard, cruel man, a selfish drunkard. Christmas used to say of him, in after years, “It would be difficult to find a more unconscionable man than James Lewis in the whole course of a wicked world.” During these, which ought to have been the most valuable years of his life, no care was taken of his heart, his mind, or his morals; in fact, he had neither a friend nor a home. At the age of seventeen he could not read a word, he was surrounded by the worst of examples, and he became the subject of a number of serious accidents, through which he narrowly escaped with his life. Once he was stabbed in a quarrel, once he was nearly drowned, and with difficulty recovered; once he fell from a high tree with an open knife in his hand, and once a horse ran away with him, passing at full speed through a low and narrow passage. There is an erroneous impression that, in those days, he was a great boxer, and that he lost his eye in a fight; the truth is quite different; he was not a boxer, and never fought a battle in his life. He lost his eye after his conversion, when he and some other young men were attempting the work of mutual help, in making up for lost time, by evening meetings, for various works of instruction; a number of his former companions waylaid him at night, beat him unmercifully, and one struck him with a stick over the eye. In after years, when some one was jesting before Robert Hall at Welsh preachers, upon his mentioning Christmas Evans, the jester said, “And he only has one eye!” “Yes, sir,” he answered, “but that’s a piercer; an eye, sir, that could light an army through a wilderness in a dark night.” So that in his sightless eye, Christmas Evans, like the one-eyed Spiridion, the noble witness in the Nicean Council, really “bore in his body a mark of the Lord Jesus.” But we are anticipating.
At about seventeen years of age, he left his bad uncle and his more servile employments; still continuing the occupation of a farming lad, he went to Glanclettwr; afterwards he lived at Penyralltfawr, at Gwenawlt, and then at Castellhywel. Thus the days of his youth passed; he looks like a poor, neglected, and forsaken lad. Of books he knew nothing,—he had no men of intelligence around him with whom to converse, and his condition in life doomed him to association with all that was low and brutal. And yet, strange as it may seem, as his friend and earliest biographer, Mr. Rhys Stephen, has testified, even then, as in the instance of the rugged young Samson, “the Spirit of the Lord began to move him at times.” It is not credible that, however crushed down beneath the weight of such abject circumstances, the boy could have been exactly what the other boys and men round him were; restless feelings, and birth-throes of emotion and thought, make themselves known in most of us before they assume a shape in consciousness: it is natural that it should have been so with him. With a life of seriousness, which resulted in Church membership, and which appears to have taken place when he was about seventeen years of age, commenced his life of mental improvement,—the first humble beginnings of intellectual effort. It is singular that the Church with which he first united, at Llwynrhydowain, originally Presbyterian, and of considerable importance in the early history of Welsh Nonconformity, approached very nearly, when Evans united with it, to Unitarianism. Its pastor was the Rev. David Davies; he was an Arian, an eminent bard, a scholar, an admirable and excellent man, who has left behind him a very honourable reputation. Such a man as Mr. Davies was, he would be likely to be interested in the intelligent and intellectual state of the youth of his Church and congregation. The slight accounts we possess of the avidity with which Christmas Evans and his companions commenced their “pursuit of knowledge under difficulties,” is very animating and pleasing; they combined together with the desire to obtain the earliest and most necessary means of mental acquisitiveness, such as reading and writing, a desire for the acquisition of religious knowledge, and what may be spoken of as some of the higher branches of study. But we will employ Christmas Evans’s own words:—
“During a revival which took place in the Church under the care of Mr. David Davies, many young people united themselves with that people, and I amongst them. What became of the major part of these young converts, I have never known; but I hope God’s grace followed them as it did me, the meanest of the whole. One of the fruits of this awakening was the desire for religious knowledge that fell upon us. Scarcely one person out of ten could, at this time, and in those neighbourhoods, read at all, even in the language of the country. We bought Bibles and candles, and were accustomed to meet together in the evening, in the barn of Penyralltfawr; and thus, in about one month, I was able to read the Bible in my mother tongue. I was vastly delighted with so much learning. This, however, did not satisfy me, but I borrowed books, and learnt a little English. Mr. Davies, my pastor, understood that I thirsted for knowledge, and took me to his school, where I stayed for six months. Here I went through the Latin Grammar; but so low were my circumstances that I could stay there no longer.”
To preach, as we all know, has often been an object of ambition with young converts, and the novices in the vestibule of knowledge of the spiritual life; such an ambition seems very early to have stirred in the heart of young Christmas. We have already mentioned how it was that he so cruelly lost the use of an eye; it illustrates the singular brutality of the time and neighbourhood; an inoffensive lad, simply because he renounced the society of profane drunkards, and was laudably busying himself with the affairs of a higher life, was set upon in the darkness of the night by six young ruffians, unmercifully beaten with sticks, and the sight of an eye destroyed. It was the night after this calamity that he had a dream; and the dream of the night reveals the bent of his day dreams. He dreamt that the Day of Judgment was come, that he saw the world in a blaze; with great confidence he called out, “Jesus, save me!” And he thought he saw the Lord turn towards him and say, “It was thy intention to preach the Gospel, but it is now too late, for the Day of Judgment is come.” But this vision of the night clung to him when he awoke; perhaps he feared that the loss of the eye would interfere with his acceptance as a minister. Certainly the dream had an influence on his future career,—so had many other dreams. It was always his belief that he had received some of his most important impressions from dreams: nothing, apparently, no amount of reason or argument, could persuade him to the contrary. To preach the Gospel became an ardent desire now with this passionately imaginative and earnest youth; but there were serious hindrances in the way. There appears to have been a kind of law in the Church with which he was connected at Llwynrhydowain, that no member of the Church should be permitted to preach until he had passed through a college course. It is very remarkable that two of the greatest preachers who have adorned the pulpit of Wales should have been admitted into Church fellowship together on the same evening,—David Davies, afterwards of Swansea, whose name we have already mentioned, and Christmas Evans. It was always the regret and complaint of their first pastor, that the Church law to which we have referred, deprived his Church of the two most eminent men it had ever produced. There were, no doubt, other reasons; but it is singular, now, to notice the parallelism of the gifted pair, for they also preached their first sermon, within a week of each other, in the same cottage. Cottage preaching was then of much more importance than it now seems to our ecclesiastical and æsthetic apprehensions; and the congregations which assembled in those old Welsh cottages were such as to try the mental and spiritual strength of a young preacher. How Davies acquitted himself, and how he ran his course, we may notice by-and-bye; our present concern is with Christmas Evans. Perhaps our readers will not entertain a depreciating opinion of the youth, when they hear him very candidly confess that the substance of his first sermon was taken from Beveridge’s “Thesaurus Theologicus,” a book borrowed, probably, from his pastor. But a Mr. Davies, who must have been a reading man although a farmer, heard it, was very much impressed by it, but went home and found it; so that the poor boy’s reputation as a preacher seemed gone. “Still,” said the good man, “I have some hope of the son of Samuel the shoemaker, because the prayer was as good as the sermon.” But perhaps he would not have thought so hopefully of the young man had he then known, what Christmas afterwards confessed, that the prayer, too, was very greatly committed to memory from a collection of prayers by a well-known clergyman, Griffith Jones of Llanddowror.
Such was the first public effort of this distinguished preacher; like the first effort of his great English contemporary, Robert Hall, we suppose it would be regarded as a failure. Meantime, we have to notice that the spiritual life of the youth was going on; he began to be dissatisfied with the frame of theologic sentiment of the Church to which he belonged. He heard preachers who introduced him to the more grand, scriptural, and evangelical views of Christian truth. The men of that time did not play at preaching; the celebrated David Morris, father of the yet more celebrated Ebenezer Morris; the great Peter Williams, Jones of Llangan, Thomas Davies of Neath,—such men as these appear to have kindled in his mind loftier views of the person and the work of Christ. Also, a man named Amos, who had been a member of the same Church with Christmas Evans, had left that communion, and joined that of the Baptists. A close study of the Word of God led Christmas also to a change of convictions as to the meaning and importance of the rite of baptism. A similar change of theologic opinion was passing through the mind of his young friend and fellow-member, David Davies, who finally united himself with the Independent communion. Christmas Evans says, “I applied to the Baptist Church at Aberduar, where I was in due time received; I was then about twenty years and six months old. I was baptized by the Rev. Timothy Thomas.”
As the names of successive persons and pastors pass before our eyes, and appear in these pages, it is at once affecting, humbling, and elevating, to think of men of whom our ears have scarcely ever heard, but who, in their day, were men “of whom the world was not worthy,” and whose “record is now on high.” Such a man, beyond all question, was this Timothy Thomas, the son of an eminent father, the brother of men who, if not as eminent as himself, were yet worthy of the noble relationship. He was a Welsh gentleman, lived on a farm, an extended lease of which he held, and which enabled him to preach and fulfil the work of a pastor without any monetary reward. He appears to have devoted himself, his time, his energy, and his property to the work of the ministry. His farm was a splendid one in the vale of the Teivy. Mr. Rhys Stephen, who knew him, speaks of his gallant bearing, his ingenuous spirit, and of his princely magnanimity; he would ride thirty or forty miles on a Saturday, through the remote wilds of Caermarthenshire and Cardiganshire, to be ready for the services on the Sunday. His gentlemanly bearing overcame and beat down mobs which sometimes assembled for the purpose of insulting and assailing him. Mr. Stephen mentions one singular instance, when Mr. Thomas was expected to administer the ordinance of baptism, and, as was not unusual in those days, in the natural baptistry of the river. A mob had assembled together for the purpose of insulting and annoying the service, the missiles of offence in their hands; when, suddenly, a well-dressed gentleman, mounted on a noble horse, rode over the village bridge; he hastily alighted, gave his bridle to a bystander, walked briskly into the middle of the little flock; the inimical members of the mob set him down for a magistrate at the least, and expected that he would give the word to disperse; but instead of doing so, he took the nearest candidate by the hand, and walked himself down into the stream, booted and spurred as he was. Before the mob had done gaping, he had done this part of his work; after this, however, he stood upon the brink of the stream, still in his wet attire, and preached one of his ardent sermons. He certainly conciliated the homage of the opposing forces, and left them under the impression that the “dippers,” as the Baptists were generally called, had certainly one gentleman among them. We do not know how our Baptist brethren would like to submit to this kind of service, but it certainly seems to resemble more closely the baptism of Enon, near to Salem, and that of the Ethiopian prince by Philip, than some we have seen.
The anecdotes of this Timothy Thomas are too good and too numerous to be entirely passed by. Once he was preaching in the enchanting neighbourhood near Llandeilo, to which we referred in the first chapter—the neighbourhood of Grongar Hill, and Golden Grove; the neighbourhood of Dyer, Steele, and Jeremy Taylor. It was a still Sabbath morning in the summer, and in that lovely spot immense crowds were gathered to hear him. He had administered baptism, and preached, without interruption, when someone came up to him and told him, with startled fear and trepidation, that the clergyman,—the rector,—on his way to the church, had been detained, utterly unable to pass through the crowd, through the greater part of the service. Instantly, with admirable tact and catholicity, he exclaimed: “I understand that the respected clergyman of the parish has been listening patiently to me for the last hour; let us all go to the church and return the compliment by hearing him.” The church, and the churchyard as well, were instantly crowded; the clergyman was delighted with the catholic spirit displayed by the Baptist minister, and of course not a word further was said about the trespass which had been committed.
Timothy Thomas was a noble specimen of what has been called the “muscular Christian;” he had great courage. Once, when travelling with his wife, and set upon by four ruffians, he instantly, with his single stick, floored two, but broke his stick in the very act of conquest. Immediately he flew to a hedge and tore up a prodigious stake, and was again going forth to victory, when the scoundrels, having had enough of this bishop of the Church militant, took to flight and left him in undisputed possession of the field. A remarkable man this,—a sort of Welsh chieftain; a perfect gentleman, but half farmer, half preacher. In the order of Church discipline, a man was brought up before him, as the pastor, for having knocked down an Unitarian. “Let us hear all about it,” said the pastor. “To tell all the truth about it, sir,” said the culprit, “I met Jack the miller at the sign of the Red Dragon, and there we had a single glass of ale together.” “Stop a bit,” said the minister; “I hope you paid for it.” “I did, sir.” “That is in your favour, Thomas,” said the pastor; “I cannot bear those people who go about tippling at other people’s expense. Go on, Thomas.” “Well, sir, after a little while we began quietly talking about religion, and about the work of Jesus Christ. Jack said that He was only a man, and then he went on to say shocking things, things that it was beyond the power of flesh and blood to bear.” “I daresay,” said the pastor; “but what did he say?” “He actually said, sir, that the blood of Christ had no more power in it than the blood of a beast. I could not stand that any more, so I knocked him down.” “Well, brother,” said the minister, “I cannot say that you did the right thing, but I quite believe that I should have done so too. Go, and sin no more.”
But with all these marks of a strong character, the lines of Timothy Thomas’s faith were clear and firm.
Such was the man who received Christmas Evans into the Church of which he became so bright and shining an ornament. This noble man survived until his eighty-sixth year; he died at Cardigan, in 1840. He was asked, sometimes, how many he had baptized during his lifetime, and he would reply, brusquely, “About two thousand;” at other times, he would be more particular, and say, “I have baptized at least two thousand persons. Yes,” he would add tenderly, “and thirty of them have become ministers of the Gospel; and it was I who baptized Christmas Evans,”—sometimes adding naïvely, “I did it right, too,—according to the apostolic practice, you know.”