CHAPTER XXIII. BRIDGE-BUILDING.
It so happened that when William Edwards had taken his first holiday, in 1741, to be groomsman at the marriage of his sister Jonet with his friend Thomas Williams, that he had found Caerphilly—nay, all Eglwysilan—in a state of ferment, owing to the exciting presence in their midst of the noted preacher, the Rev. George Whitfield, for many years the colleague of the Rev. John Wesley, and only recently separated from him through doctrinal difference.
They had alike left their pulpits in the Church to go preaching and teaching throughout the land, in the high-ways and by-ways, denouncing the vice and folly and sin then rampant, calling sinners to repentance, admonishing their hearers to lead simple, pure, and Christ-like lives, and preaching the acceptable year of the Lord, at the same time holding, as it were, the flaming sword of God's wrath over the impenitent.
It should here be told that, finding his dear mother made light of by Cate, and set aside on the farm so very recently her own, William had himself taken the first opportunity that presented itself to remove her and Jonet to a farm he had acquired in the Aber Valley—not far from his friend Thomas Williams—a farm for his mother and Davy to manage between them.
His road hither, of course, lay through Caerphilly; and after having left the town behind him nearly two miles, he was surprised to find a concourse of people in a field by the wayside, not far from his own home, listening to a man in a clerical gown and bands, who stood on a pile of stones, and, with impassioned voice and gesture, besought his hearers to 'flee from the wrath to come.' His text had evidently been: 'To-day if ye will hear His voice, harden not your heart;'[15] and he hammered at the 'to-day' until he drove it into the hearts of many around him. Women wept, men fell on their knees and called out aloud as emotion swayed them, and William sat like a statue until the last word was spoken and the preacher, worn out with his own fervour, turned to depart along with some friends of his own.
William, like scores beside him, had gone to church and read his Bible as a duty; had learned the catechism the good vicar drilled into the youth of his flock; but beyond that his religion did not go very deep.
George Whitfield's sermon, on which he had come so suddenly, was like the bow drawn at a venture, the sharp arrow from which smote the King of Israel between the joints of his armour; for so it pierced the heart of the young man, whose very thought of late had been of furnace-building and of English study.
The face, the voice, the manner of the earnest preacher haunted him no less than his awakening words. And when Davy, who had been also a listener, laid his hand upon the horse's bridle, and spoke to him, he started like one aroused from a dream.
To suit general convenience—the old vicar's included—it had been arranged that Jonet and Thomas Williams should be married at St. Martin's, Caerphilly—then only a chapel-of-ease to Eglwysilan; and there a fresh surprise awaited William Edwards, for when, the following day, the united wedding party from Brookside and Aber dashed helter-skelter along the road to the church, in their race to catch the bride, he beheld a gravely-attired procession on foot, somewhat ahead of them, proceeding calmly in the same direction. And, when their own panting steeds had been left behind at a convenient inn, he observed that, of the more decorous bridal party entering the church porch, the bridegroom, a man of some twenty-seven years, was no other than that same Rev. George Whitfield, whose words had burnt themselves into his breast, never to be effaced, and his bride, Elizabeth James, whom he knew by sight.