British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII / January and April, 1871

by Various

'Now, the question is what a faithful minister of the gospel ought to do in such dangerous times? I am very sure that some conscientious ministers of the gospel have suffered severely of late years under these lordly and tyrannic prelates. The number of such disinterested persons, it must be owned, was small, and every art and method have been used to discountenance them. If what I here aver be doubted, I appeal to the writings of the late pious and truly reverend Mr. Griffith Jones, of Llanddowror, who underwent the scurrilities of a venal priest hired by the bishops to bespatter him, though he was by the special grace of God without any stain or spot. By far the greater number of the clergy, like Gehazi, run after preferments, and have left the daughter of Zion to shift for herself. And his doom, in a spiritual sense, is likely to follow them and their successors.'

It is well known that the man who may be called the father of Welsh Methodism was Mr. Howell Harris. He was, and continued to the day of his death, a dutiful son of the Church. He applied for ordination, but was refused. He pressed his request for six years, but to no purpose. 'Wherever he went,' we quote again the language of a Welsh clergyman, 'as a simple and unoffending preacher of the gospel, either in the South or the North, he was denounced by the clergy from their pulpits, he was arrested by the magistrates, and persecuted by the rabble.[161] Now let us hear his own account of the reasons which induced him to commence and continue preaching to his countrymen. He describes his being taken before the magistrates at Monmouth, for the work of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, and then continues—

'After this, I was more satisfied than ever that my mission was from God, especially as I had so often applied for holy orders, and was rejected for no other reason than my preaching as a layman. I saw both from Scripture and the practice of the Church that the preaching of laymen was proper in times of necessity; and I thought that time of greater necessity could hardly be than the present, when the whole country lay in a lukewarm and lifeless condition. In many churches there was no sermon for months together; in some places nothing but a learned English discourse to an illiterate Welsh congregation; and where an intelligible sermon was preached, it was generally so legal, and so much in the spirit of the old covenant, that should any give heed to it, they could never be led thereby to Christ, the only way to God. Seeing these things, and feeling the love of Christ in my heart, I could not refrain from going about to propagate the gospel of my dear Redeemer.'[162]

The second great name in connection with the rise of Methodism in Wales, was the Rev. Daniel Rowlands, of Llangeitho, a man whose powers as a preacher are described by those who knew both, to have surpassed even those of Whitfield. The effect of his eloquence among his countrymen was extraordinary. It ran like a stream of electricity through the nation, kindling into life thousands who had been previously wrapped in spiritual torpor. Like Howell Harris, he was not merely content, but anxious to continue his ministrations in the Church. 'But he was cast out of the Church of England,' says one of his biographers, the Rev. J. C. Ryle, 'for no other fault than excess of zeal.' And what was the condition of the church, from which this over zealous man was expelled by Episcopal judgment? Mr. Ryle shall answer. 'This ejection took place at a time when scores of Welsh clergymen were shamefully neglecting their duties, and too often were drunkards, gamblers, and sportsmen, if not worse.'[163]

The inference from all this has already been drawn for us by a candid Churchman. Mr. Johnes, in his 'Essay on the Causes of Dissent in Wales,' says that he is irresistibly led to the conclusion 'that before the rise of Methodism in Wales the churches were as little attended by the great mass of people as they are now: and that indifference to all religion prevailed as widely then as dissent in the present day.' Of the early Methodists in Wales, as indeed of the early Nonconformists, it may be said most truly that they did not leave the Church of their own accord. Most of them clung to it with a most touching fidelity, in spite of incessant persecution and obloquy from those within its pale, and were at last thrust out of it, for no offence but the excess of their zeal for the moral and spiritual improvement of their countrymen. It is not necessary now to put in any defence for these men; for it has become the fashion of late among our Church friends in Wales, while denouncing modern Nonconformity as schismatic, turbulent, self-seeking, and other choice epithets with which we are so familiar in this connection, to speak with great tenderness and respect of the founders of Welsh dissent, and especially the early Methodists. Retaining, of course, that de haut en bas air of extreme candour and condescension which any Churchman, however small, thinks it right to assume when referring to any Dissenter, however illustrious for capacity and service, they do nevertheless admit that the men in question were admirable men, full of genuine zeal for evangelical truth and the salvation of souls. Nor do they scruple to deplore and censure the perverse policy which persecuted such men and drove them from the Church. Nay, in some cases, clergymen have even become their admiring and eulogistic biographers. But this is the old thing over again. 'Ye build the tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' But then, unhappily, by displaying the same spirit towards the successors of these men, and branding them with the same epithets of contumely and reproach as their fathers applied to their fathers, and that for doing precisely the same work, they are witnesses unto themselves that they are the genuine children of them which persecuted the prophets.

Having brought our review down to the great revival of religion about the middle of the last century, let us now inquire what the Church has done since that time to make up for centuries of gross neglect or perfunctory service. It might have been thought that this stirring of spiritual life in the country, through other agencies than its own, would have roused it, were it from no better motive than that of jealous emulation, to make some effort to retain or recover its influence over the population. And this, indeed, has been the case to some extent within the last quarter of a century. But for nearly a hundred years after the appearance of Harris and Rowlands, during which all bodies of Dissenters were labouring incessantly for the evangelization of the Principality, the Church was settled on her lees. Her rulers not only winked at for their own profit, but actively maintained and promoted the existence of abuses as audacious and monstrous as ever dishonoured a Christian Church. Her clergy, wholly abandoned to themselves, with little or no episcopal supervision or stimulus, were content with enjoying their temporalities while they neglected their duties, leading lives of mere worldly ease, and sometimes much worse lives than that. If any reader should imagine we are indulging in exaggerations, we can refer him for exuberance of proof to Mr. Johnes' most able and admirable work, which we have already mentioned. It was published in 1832, and describes the state of things then in actual existence. The sole object of most of the alien bishops who had been and were in occupation of the Welsh sees, seemed to have been to provide for themselves and those of their own households. Never was episcopal nepotism carried to so daring an excess, with this peculiar and enormous aggravation, that 'in Wales every relation of a bishop is in language a foreigner; and his uncouth attempts to officiate in his church in a tongue unintelligible to himself, can be felt by his congregation as nothing better than a profanation of the worship of God.'[164] As a specimen of how the chief pastors of the Welsh Church acted in this matter, we subjoin an extract from a speech delivered in the House of Commons, in 1836, by Mr. Benjamin Hall, afterwards Lord Llanover, a gentleman whose name and memory ought to be held in grateful and honourable remembrance in the Principality, for the strenuous efforts he made in and out of Parliament to remedy many flagrant abuses in the educational and ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and to procure something like justice for Wales:—

'What he complained of most was the unbounded spirit of nepotism which seemed to take possession of some of these English Bishops the moment they took up this episcopal power in the Principality. He found that in the diocese of St. Asaph a relation of the late bishop held the following preferments:—He was dean and chancellor of the diocese, with the deanery house, worth about £40 a year; parish of Huellan, £1,500; St. Asaph, £426; Llan Nevydd, £300; Llanvair, £220; Darowain, £120; Chancellorship, from fees, £400;—making £3,006. Besides all this, he was lessee of Llandegele and Llanasaph, worth £600, and this all exclusive of the rectory of Cradley, in the diocese of Hereford, £1,200; vicarage of Bromyard, £500; prebend of Hereford, £50; portion of Bromyard, £50 at present, but it is expected on the death of an old life that this preferment will be worth £1,400. Thus he had no less than eleven sources of emolument, producing between six and seven thousand a-year. It appears also that his brother had about £3,000 a-year, and the total enjoyed by relations of the late bishop of the diocese alone, amounts to between seven and eight thousand. But it appeared, moreover, that the amount enjoyed by the bishop, and the relations of the former bishops alone, amounts to £23,679, and exceeds the whole amount enjoyed by all the other resident and native clergy put together.'

To what unseemly consequences the appointment of English clergymen to Welsh incumbencies must have led, our readers may conceive by imagining a number of Frenchmen installed in livings in England, and attempting to perform the service in the English language. Here are a few examples of the ludicrous scenes often witnessed in Welsh churches. They are taken from a speech delivered in 1852 by the Rev. Joseph Hughes, a very able clergyman, a native of the Principality, but residing then at Meltham:—

'The mistakes,' he says, 'that are made by Anglo-Welsh clergymen, both in the reading-desk and pulpit, are nearly as many as the words in a Welsh glossary. Some of these mistakes are of an absurd and revolting character, and subversive of that due solemnity which should be observed in the house of God. Yea, the meaning of different words and sentences of Scripture is often painfully associated in the minds of the people with those mistakes.'

Before citing these specimens, we may premise that if any of our readers should be acquainted with the Welsh language, they will immediately perceive how probable it is that the blunders described should have been committed by an Englishman trying to read Welsh, or rather, how next to impossible it is that he should not have committed some of them.