Mr. Gladstone lamented, as members of the Welsh Church also sometimes profess to lament, the want of accurate and trustworthy information as to the real facts of the case as regards the several religious opinions in Wales. But whose fault is that? There would be no difficulty whatever, in a small country like Wales, in obtaining perfectly accurate information as to the number of adherents to the church, if that body were to follow the example of the principal Nonconformist denominations in the Principality, who collect and publish periodically statistical returns of the members of their churches, and the attendants at public worship. But the clergy of the establishment, clinging tenaciously in the face of notorious facts to the fond fancy that theirs is the national church, however small a fragment of the nation really belongs to it, decline to give us the number either of their communicants or of those who habitually frequent their churches. We are driven therefore to look for such incidental indications of the real state of the case as may come within our reach. Some of these, however, are very significant. In the National Society's report for 1866-7 there is a return given of the number of persons attending Church Sunday Schools in Wales. They amounted to 49,358, or 4 per cent. of the population. The number found in Dissenting Sunday Schools, according to the printed year books of the various denominations on the same year, was 351,128, or 29 per cent. of the population, thus showing the Church Sunday scholars to be one-eighth of the entire number. These returns are all the more valuable, because in Wales it is not the children merely that attend the Sunday schools, but a very large proportion of the adult population also.
Very striking revelations have been made, likewise, in connection with Day Schools in Wales, tending to throw much light on the actual and comparative strength of the church. When the committee of Council on Education began to make grants for the erection of schools, there was a great rush of applicants from the friends of the Established Church in Wales. They had many advantages in their favour for undertaking the work of establishing Day Schools. They had nearly the whole land and a great proportion of the wealth of the country in their possession. As they drew the means for the support of their clergy, the fabrics of the church, and public worship—which the Dissenters had to provide out of their own pockets—from the national endowments, they had all their resources at liberty to devote to the work of education. The administrators of the national fund were their partial friends, and dispensed it with a lavish profusion, with little or no inquiry into the fitness of those who applied, to direct and control the education of such a population as that of Wales. The National Society, as already shown, made an appeal, which was liberally responded to, for a special fund in which the co-operation of England was solicited, to promote 'the education of our fellow-countrymen throughout Wales in the principles of our common church.' Our friends of the Establishment, moreover, were restrained by no scruple whatever from receiving public money to any extent for teaching their own peculiar tenets in day schools, while the Dissenters conscientiously refused the proffered grants of Government aid for religious instruction. This sudden access of educational zeal sprang avowedly in great part from proselyting motives. The Bishop of St. David's, in one of his early charges, adverting to the peculiar condition of the Principality, confessed that the existing generation was hopelessly alienated from the church, but that the next could and must be recovered by attending to the education of the young. The result of this effort was that State-aided Church schools sprang up in all the larger towns and villages, and in many remote hamlets, and that often in places where there were not half-a-dozen church children.[167] In these schools the principles of the National Society were rigidly enforced. All the children were taught the Church catechism, and obliged to attend church on Sundays. But State-aided schools were liable to inspection, and the inspectors had to present their reports to the Committee of Council, and these were laid before Parliament and the public. It was not possible, therefore, in reporting on the state of education in Wales, wholly to conceal the fact, that an enormous majority of the people held religious views different from those held by the class who in many places had undertaken to direct their education. This has often come out in the reports of even Church of England Inspectors. Thus the Rev. Longueville Jones, who was inspector of Church schools in Wales in 1854, says:—'The number of children in Welsh schools whose parents belong to the Church is so very small, that it requires great experience and delicacy of feeling to treat their young minds as they should be.'[168] As an illustration of the difficulty with which this gentleman had to contend, it is only necessary to refer to the statistics he gives of one school under his inspection, in which out of 107 children, only five were of parents belonging to the Church, whilst in the following year the same school contained 144 children, of whom two only were of church-going parents. To come down to a later period in the report of the Rev. S. Pryce, Inspector of Church of England Schools for Mid-Wales, for 1868, we find the following admission:—'The number of children attending the Welsh country schools I visit, is great beyond all proportion when compared with the number of persons attending church.'[169]
Among the inspectors of British schools in Wales was and is Mr. J. Bowstead. We believe that Mr. Bowstead is himself a churchman. But he is a liberal and candid churchman. When, therefore, in the discharge of his office, he began to visit the country, some eighteen or twenty years ago, he was forcibly struck with the singular anomaly he found to exist, of a large number of Church schools in some cases liberally subsidized from the public funds, and in others supported by deductions from workmen's wages, planted among a population of Dissenters, who felt the strongest repugnance to much of the religious teaching forced on their children in such schools. He had the courage in his reports to expose this injustice, for which he has been ever since the bête noire of the Welsh bishops and clergy, who often assail him with great acrimony and conspicuous unfairness. But on the other hand, he has the satisfaction of knowing that he has won the enthusiastic gratitude of a whole nation, who owe to him, in a main degree, the exposure of a flagrant wrong from which they had been long suffering, with little hope of deliverance. Well, Mr. Bowstead, after extensive and careful inquiry, in order to show the aggravated character of the anomaly of which he complained, ventured to say that nine-tenths of the common people in Wales were Nonconformists. A writer in the April number of the Quarterly Review has assailed him very angrily, and has accused him of 'asserting without a shadow of proof that nine-tenths of the Welsh people are Nonconformists.' In a pamphlet issued for private circulation, Mr. Bowstead has with just severity first rebuked his assailant for perverting his words, and then shown how little foundation there is for the charge of his having asserted without 'a shadow of proof,' what alone he did assert, that nine-tenths of the common people of Wales, of such people as use elementary schools, are Nonconformists. Now for the proof of this allegation. When Sir John Pakington's committee was sitting in 1865-6, Mr. Bowstead was one of the witnesses summoned to give evidence. He had been asked to procure the best information he could, as to the comparative numbers of children of church people and children of Dissenters in the schools he visited. He had no difficulty in getting at this from the school register, because the name of the Sunday school which each child attends is entered in a column provided for the purpose, a very satisfactory index of the denomination to which its parents belong. And what was the result? He received returns from thirty schools, 'which were the only elementary schools in their respective localities. These thirty schools had an aggregate of 6,799 children under instruction, and of these 756 were returned as belonging to the Church. The children of parents attached to the Church formed, therefore, about 11 per cent. of the whole, and the children of Nonconformists constituted the remaining 89 per cent. But Mr. Bowstead supplies us with more recent evidence, which we give in his own words:—
'I have not on this occasion attempted to obtain returns from so wide an area as in 1866; but I have secured very complete and reliable returns, upon a considerable scale, from a locality which embraces some 20,000 inhabitants, all of whom are brought together by the industrial operations of one large Company; and all of whose children, so far as they belong to the working classes, receive their education in schools promoted by that Company. The locality is Dowlais, which in the matter of education is the Prussia of South Wales. It has an admirable system of schools, embracing not only unsectarian Protestant schools for the bulk of the community, but also Roman Catholic schools for the Irish. Nearly one-sixth of the whole population may be found on the registers of these schools at any moment, and I should think there is scarcely a child in the place that does not receive some amount of schooling, whilst those of them who stay long enough at school secure a very thorough elementary English education, together with some instruction in the French language and in drawing. I know of no place where the schools reproduce so complete a picture of the population around them, or where the free play of all the social forces presents so true a type of the characteristic features of the working men of the district.'
Mr. Bowstead then subjoins a table showing the number of children belonging to each denomination, in attendance at the Dowlais schools: out of a total of 2,933, those belonging to the Established Church are 266. 'The Church children therefore would be almost 7·7 per cent., or one-thirteenth of the whole, and the Nonconformists would claim the remaining twelve-thirteenths. This gives a larger proportion to the Nonconformists than any former return.' Accompanying this return there is a letter from Mr. G. T. Clark, the manager of the Dowlais works, containing two or three sentences which are of great significance and value. In sending the tabular statement just referred to, Mr. Clark remarks:—'The proportion of the several sects may, I think, be taken as typical of the manufacturing population of South Wales and Monmouthshire.' We must quote two or three other sentences from Mr. Clark's letter:—
'I see a great deal is said about the disposition of the Welsh Dissenters to allow their children to attend Church schools. We have both Church and neutral schools in this district, and I believe the Church schools of my friend and neighbour the Rector of Gelligaer to be as good as any semi-rural Schools in Wales, and they are largely attended by the children of Dissenters. But this is not from love of the Church, but because they desire education, and the district has no other schools. The Welsh, in this respect, like the Scotch, have a craving to get on, and they will make a sacrifice to educate their children; and if the only accessible school be a Church school, to it they will apply. They trust and safely trust to the domestic example, and to the Sunday teaching in the chapel, and chapel school, to keep the children in the special faith of their parents.... Those who say that the South Wales manufacturing population have a regard for the Church of England speak in utter ignorance of the matter. Their dislike to the Church, as an establishment, is very strong, and is yearly becoming stronger.'
It would be difficult to find a more competent and trustworthy witness. Mr. Clark is himself an attached member of the Church of England. He is a gentleman of rare intelligence, who has for many years been at the head of one of the largest and best conducted of the great iron works of South Wales. His knowledge of the population of the whole district is extensive and accurate. His testimony therefore as to the comparative number of Churchmen and Dissenters, and the feelings of the Nonconformists towards the Establishment, must be held to be unimpeachable.
But what is the comparative progress in accommodation for worship made by the Church and the Nonconformists since the Census of 1851? We have the materials for an approximate estimate. The Bishop of Llandaff, in his last charge, delivered in August, 1869, states that since 1849, the number of new churches erected in his diocese is thirty-nine, not quite two churches in the year; and the number of churches rebuilt on the same site, but whether enlarged is not stated, is thirty-six, making a total of seventy-five. Against this we have to place the following return, furnished to us in detail, but of which we can here give only a summary, of what has been done in the same diocese by three Nonconformist bodies since 1850:—
| Number of new chapels built by the Independents | 68 | |
| Number of ditto rebuilt and enlarged | 46 | |
| 114 | ||
| Number of new chapels built by the Baptists | 66 | |
| Number of ditto rebuilt and enlarged | 39 | |
| 105 | ||
| Number of new chapels built by Calvinistic Methodists | 52 | |
| Number of ditto rebuilt and enlarged | 42 | |
| 94 | ||
| 313 |
Let it be observed that this showing includes only the three principal Nonconformist denominations, as we have failed to procure returns of the different bodies of Wesleyan Methodists and other minor sects, which would make undoubtedly a considerable addition to the total increase of dissenting accommodation. And yet how does the comparison stand even with such incomplete elements as we possess? We find that the Nonconformists have built 186 new places of worship against thirty-nine built by the Church, and have rebuilt and enlarged 127 more against thirty-six rebuilt by the Church.