“Elias Jones,” was the answer.
“Then call the young man John Elias,” said the speaker, “otherwise we shall by and by have nobody but John Joneses.”
And “John Elias” it remained.
An accession of temperance hymns in Wales followed the spread of the “Washingtonian” 445 / 391 movement on the other side of the Atlantic in 1840, and began a moral reformation in the county of Merioneth that resulted in a spiritual one, and added to the churches several thousand converts, scarcely any of whom fell away.
The revival of 1851–2 was a local one, but was believed by many to have been inspired by a celestial antiphony. The remarkable sounds were either a miracle or a psychic wonder born of the intense imagination of a sensitive race. A few pious people in a small village of Montgomeryshire had been making special prayer for an outpouring of the spirit, but after a week of meetings with no sign of the result hoped for, they were returning to their homes, discouraged, when they heard strains of sweet music in the sky. They stopped in amazement, but the beautiful singing went on—voices as of a choir invisible, indistinct but melodious, in the air far above the roof of the chapel they had just left. Next day, when the astonished worshippers told the story, numbers in the district said they had heard the same sounds. Some had gone out at eleven o'clock to listen, and thought that angels must be singing. Whatever the music meant, the good brethren's and sisters' little meetings became crowded very soon after, and the longed-for out-pouring came mightily upon the neighborhood. Hundreds from all parts flocked to the churches, all ages joining in the prayers and hymns and testimonies, and a harvest of glad believers followed a series of meetings “led by the Holy Ghost.”
The sounds in the sky were never explained; but the belief that God sent His angels to sing an answer to the anxious prayers of those pious brethren and sisters did no one any harm.
Whether this event in Montgomeryshire was a preparation for what took place six or seven years later is a suggestive question only, but when the wave of spiritual power from the great American revival of 1857–8 reached England, its first messenger to Wales, Rev. H.R. Jones, a Wesleyan, had only to drop the spark that “lit a prairie fire.” The reformation, chiefly under the leadership of Mr. Jones and Rev. David Morgan, a Presbyterian, with their singing bands, was general and lasting, hundreds of still robust and active Christians today dating their new birth from the Pentecost of 1859 and its ingathering of eighty thousand souls.
A favorite hymn of that revival was the penitential cry,—
O'th flaem, O Dduw! 'r wy'n dyfod,
—in the seven-six metre so much loved in Wales.