Tell me Thou art mine, O Saviour
Grant me an assurance clear,
Banish all my dark misgivings,
Still my doubting, calm my fear.
Besides his Welsh hymns, published in the first and in the second and larger editions of his Hallelujah, and in two or three other collections, William Williams wrote and published two books 441 / 387 of English hymns,* the Hosanna (1759) and the Gloria (1772). He fills so large a space in the hymnology and religious history of Wales that he will necessarily reappear in other pages of this chapter.
* Possibly they were written in Welsh, and translated into English by his friend and neighbor, Peter Williams.
From the days of the early religious awakenings under the 16th century preachers, and after the ecclesiastical dynasty of Rome had been replaced by that of the Church of England, there were periods when the independent conscience of a few pious Welshmen rose against religious formalism, and the credal constraints of “established” teaching—and suffered for it. Burning heretics at the stake had ceased to be a church practice before the 1740's, but Howell Harris, Daniel Rowlands, and the rest of the “Methodist Fathers,” with their followers, were not only ostracised by society and haled before magistrates to be fined for preaching, and sometimes imprisoned, but they were chased and beaten by mobs, ducked in ponds and rivers, and pelted with mud and garbage when they tried to speak or sing. But they kept on talking and singing. Harris (who had joined the army in 1760) owned a commission, and once he saved himself from the fury of a mob while preaching—with cloak over his ordinary dress—by lifting his cape and showing the star on his breast. No one dared molest an officer of His Britannic Majesty. 442 / 388 But all were not able to use St. Paul's expedient in critical moments.*
* Acts 22:25.