'And whatever they can lay their hands upon or get from us, whether by right or wrong, they carry into England, and waste and consume the whole of the profits obtained from us, in abbeys and lands given to them by the king of England. And like the Parthians, who shoot backwards from afar as they retreat, so do they from England excommunicate us as often as they are ordered so to do....
'Besides these things, when the Saxons (English) rush into Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury puts the whole land under an interdict, and because we and our people defend our country against the Saxons and other enemies, he places us and our people under judgment of excommunication, and causes those bishops whom he sent among us to proclaim this judgment, which they are ready to do on all occasions. The consequence is, that every one of our people who falls on the field of blood, in defence of the liberty of his country, dies under the curse of excommunication.'
When the Reformation came, the influence of the connection with England was, if possible, still more disastrous on the religious interests of Wales. 'The robbery in times of peace,' says Mr. Johnes, 'proved worse than the spoliation in the times of war, and the rapacity of the Reformation was added to the rapacity of Popery.' He then describes, in language of eloquent indignation, how the ecclesiastical endowments of the Principality were pitilessly plundered by being bestowed upon laymen, the descendants of the Norman invaders, or by being alienated from the Church of Wales to endow English bishoprics and colleges! For the last century and a half, again, the policy of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in dealing with the Welsh Church has, it would seem, been steadily directed to the extinction of the Welsh language and nationality by the appointment of Englishmen to bishoprics, canonries, deaneries, and most of the richest livings in Wales, in utter contempt of all decency. And now when, by the legitimate operation of a State establishment of religion, nearly the whole nation has been alienated from the Church, so that it has become a mere encumbrance in the land, we are told that Wales is so inseparably united with England that it cannot expect to be rid of the incubus until England has made up its mind to deal with its own Church Establishment.
But what we have to do with most especially at present is the Protestant Church Establishment in Wales, and our indictment against it is this, that at no period of its history has it fulfilled, in anything approaching to a satisfactory manner, its proper function as the religious instructor of the Welsh people. We have a chain of testimonies in support of this allegation that are unimpeachable as to their quality, and of overwhelming force in their concurrence and cumulation of evidence. We are anxious to make this point clear, because the line of defence that has been lately taken by the friends of the Church of England in Wales is to this effect. It is true, they say, that towards the middle of the last century the Church had fallen into a deep sleep, and so afforded occasion, and to some degree excuse, for the rise of Nonconformity, which was previously almost unknown in Wales. And then they point in vague and sounding phrases to the golden age that preceded that period of spiritual torpor, when the Church, alive to her high mission, ruled by native bishops, who understood the language and commanded the confidence and veneration of the country, comprehended and cared for within her ample fold the whole population of the Principality. Dissent, we are assured, is in Wales an exotic of quite modern growth, which, it is further implied, will prove to have a very ephemeral life, like Jonah's gourd, which came up in a night and perished in a night. Now all this is pure fiction. Dissent is not a thing of modern growth in Wales. It has existed more or less for 230 years, and whatever of vital religion has existed there during the whole of that period, has been owing far more to its influence than to that of the Established Church. It is not correct to say that the Church 'fell asleep' in the last century, simply because it had never been awake. 'The wisest thing, in my opinion, that our Church friends can do,' said Mr. Henry Richard, in his address at the opening of Brecon College—
'instead of pluming themselves on their antiquity, would be to cut off, so far as they can, all connection with and all memory of their past history in Wales. The succession through which they derive their ecclesiastical lineage, in this country at least, is about as unapostolical a succession as can be conceived—a succession of simony, pluralism, nepotism; of ignorance, incompetence, and utter indifference to the duties of their own high office and the claims of the unfortunate people left to their charge, on the part of those who called themselves the priests of God.'
And to begin with what must surely be considered as the first and most solemn duty of a Protestant Church, that of supplying the people of whom it professes to take charge with the Word of God in their own language, how does the account stand with the Welsh Established Church in this respect? Dr. Llewellyn, the learned author of the 'Historical Account of the Welsh Versions of the Bible,' states
'that for upwards of seventy years from the settlement of the Reformation by Queen Elizabeth, for near one hundred years from Britain's separation from the Church of Rome, there were no Bibles in Wales, but only in the cathedrals of parish churches and chapels. There was no provision made for the country or the people in general; as if they had nothing to do with the word of God, at least no further than they might hear it in their attendance on public worship once in the week.'
But how did the ecclesiastical authorities act in reference to the translation of the Scriptures into the Welsh language, even for use in the churches? In the year 1563, an Act of Parliament (5 Eliz. c. 28) was passed, ordering this work to be done. In the preamble it is recited,—
'That her Majesty's most loving and obedient subjects inhabiting within her Majesty's dominion and country of Wales, being no small part of this realm, are utterly destitute of God's Holy Word, and do remain in the like or rather more darkness and ignorance than they were in the time of Papistry.'
It was therefore enacted that the Bible, consisting of the New Testament and the Old, together with the book of Common Prayer and the Administration of the Sacraments, should be translated into the British or Welsh tongue. The duty of seeing this done was devolved upon the Bishops of St. Asaph, Bangor, St. David's, Llandaff, and Hereford, and they were subjected to a penalty of £40 each if the work were not accomplished by March, 1566. The New Testament was translated within the given period, principally by William Salesbury, a lay gentleman, with some help from the Bishop and Precentor of St. David's; but there was no version of the Old Testament for twenty years later, and that was done not by the initiative or at the instigation of the bishops, but by the spontaneous piety and patriotism of one individual, Dr. William Morgan, vicar of Llanshaidr-yn-Mochnat, Denbighshire, whose name ought to be held in everlasting veneration by all Welshmen. This was published in 1588. He acknowledges, indeed, that he received some encouragement and help from the Bishops of St. Asaph and Bangor. Ingenious apologies have been urged for the gross neglect of the bishops in fulfilling their commission. But Dr. Morgan, in the Latin dedication of his Bible to Queen Elizabeth, ascribes it to what, no doubt, was the true cause, mere 'idleness and sloth.'[154] There was no other edition of the Welsh Bible for thirty-two years. But in the year 1620, Dr. Parry, Bishop of St. Asaph, brought out a new issue. This also seems to have been the result of individual zeal, for in his preface Dr. Parry says, that the former edition having been exhausted, and many or most of the churches being either without any or with only worn-out and imperfect copies, and nobody, so far as he could learn, even thinking of a republication, he was moved to undertake the work.[155] This, likewise, was exclusively for use in the churches. The first edition of the Bible for popular use was published in an octavo form in 1630, but does not seem to have originated with the Church in any way. 'The honour,' says Dr. Llewellyn, 'of providing for the first time a supply of this kind for the inhabitants of Wales, is due to one or more citizens of London,' namely Mr. Alderman Heylin, 'sprung from Wales,' and Sir Thomas Middleton, also a native of the Principality, and an alderman of London.[156] For the next half century there was only one edition of the Scriptures in Welsh published by Churchmen, a large folio of 1,000 copies, for the pulpits of the churches. But during the same period the persecuted Nonconformists—Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell, Stephen Hughes, Thomas Gouge, and David Jones—published nine editions, consisting of about 30,000 copies of the whole Bible, and above 40,000 of the New Testament separately. During the subsequent half-century (from 1718 to 1769) we acknowledge with cordial gratitude that several large editions were issued by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, two of them at the instigation of the Rev. Griffith Jones, and one at the instigation of Dr. Llewellyn, a dissenting minister. But let it be observed that the former period, from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, synchronises as nearly as possible with the golden age which some members of the Welsh Church fondly believe to have existed in the history of that institution.