Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1760-1900

By D. Densil Morgan

Winner of the 2021 France Jones Prize for Welsh History.

As well as outlining the shape of Welsh religious history generally, this volume describes the development of Calvinistic Methodist thought up to and beyond the secession from the Established Church in 1811, and the way in which the Evangelical Revival impacted the Older Dissent to create a vibrant popular Nonconformity. Along with analysing aspects of theology and doctrine, the narrative assesses the contribution of such key personalities as William Williams Pantycelyn, Thomas Charles of Bala andThomas Jones of Denbigh, and the Nonconformists Titus Lewis, Joseph Harris ‘Gomer’, George Lewis, David Rees and Gwilym Hiraethog. Following the notorious ‘Treachery of the Blue Books’ of 1847 and the Religious Census of 1851, Anglicanism regained ground, and among the themes treated in the latter chapters are the influence of High Church Tractarianism and the Broad Church ‘Lampeter Theology’ in the parishes. The volume concludes by assessing the intellectual culture of evangelicalism personified by Lewis Edwards and Thomas Charles Edwards, and describes the challenges of Darwinism, philosophical Idealism and a more critical attitude to the biblical text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786838087

D. Densil Morgan

D. Densil Morgan is Professor Emeritus of Theology in the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, at Lampeter, and was formerly Professor of Theology at Bangor University.

Book preview

Theologia Cambrensis

Theologia Cambrensis

Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales,

Volume 2: 1760–1900

The Long Nineteenth Century

D. DENSIL MORGAN

© D. Densil Morgan, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78683-806-3

e-ISBN: 978-1-78683-808-7

The right of D. Densil Morgan to be identified as author of this work has

been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The University of Wales Press acknowledges the financial support of the University

of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

Cyflwynedig i’r plant a’r wyrion

Angharad Bowen Morgan

Iwan Bowen Morgan

Alisha Morgan Williams

Cai Morgan Thomas ac Elis Morgan Thomas

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Long Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1 1760–1790

Chapter 2 1790–1820 (i)

Chapter 3 1790–1820 (ii)

Chapter 4 1820–1859 (i)

Chapter 5 1820–1859 (ii)

Chapter 6 1860–1890

Chapter 7 1890–1900

Theology in Wales: A Conclusion

Bibliography

Preface

It is with much pleasure that the concluding part of this two-volume analysis of religion and theology in Wales, from the early modern period to the dawn of the twentieth century, can now to be released. Even more than its predecessor, Theologia Cambrensis Volume One, ‘From Reformation to Revival’, the present work, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century’, has taken me back vividly to my initiation into the riches of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Welsh religious history, first as an undergraduate in Arts and then in Theology at what was the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and subsequently as a doctoral student at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, during the 1970s and 1980s. Following a first academic appointment in 1988, my initial field of research was the development of twentieth-century religious thought, including the massive contribution of the Swiss Karl Barth, and having published fairly extensively on religion and society in post-1914 Wales and further afield, I was drawn back to the previous century and the one before that. This somewhat circular progression not only provided me with innumerable insights into the development of the Welsh religious tradition, but convinced me (if I needed convincing) of the immense value of what has been for centuries a core component of the nation’s experience. Despite the secular predilections of the twenty-first century, the positive reception given to Volume One shows that there remains a ready appreciation for a work of this nature.

In preparing the text, certain peculiarities of nomenclature needed to be addressed. For the most part (though not always), ‘Dissent’ refers to those Independents, Baptists and older Presbyterians who maintained their witness between 1760 and c.1820; ‘Nonconformity’ denotes the expansive popular movement which, by mid-century, seemed set on sweeping all before it, with the term ‘Free Churches’ making its appearance by the 1890s. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and despite its obvious Welshness, the Established Church was invariably referred to as ‘the Church of England’, though for stylistic reasons I have not wholly avoided the Victorian construct ‘Anglicanism’ in referring to the earlier period. Mostly, and except where noted, translations from the Welsh are my own. The exception is in the hymns and poetical works of William Williams Pantycelyn, where I have used verse translations from the various publications of the late Dr Eifion Evans, all of which are listed in the bibliography.

It is a particular pleasure to record my thanks once more to two valued friends, Dr Robert Pope of Westminster College, Cambridge, and Dr E. Wyn James, Emeritus Professor of Welsh at Cardiff University, for reading the typescript, making valuable suggestions on the narrative, and saving me from numerous blunders which otherwise would have gone undetected. The responsibility for the analysis and all remaining weaknesses is wholly my own. I am also indebted to Professor Medwin Hughes, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, for the generous financial support given to the project in its entirety. It was my great privilege in 2010 to be appointed the first non-Anglican Professor of Theology at what was initially known as St David’s College Lampeter. The oldest university establishment in England and Wales outside of Oxford and Cambridge, the institution will celebrate its bicentenary in 2022. I hope that this volume will serve in some way as a contribution to those celebrations. Gratitude is due too to Llion Wigley and his colleagues at the University of Wales Press, particularly Dafydd Jones, Henry Maas, Siân Chapman, Bronwen Swain and Elin Williams, for their unfailing skill, kindness and professionalism once again.

Whereas Volume One was dedicated to the memory of my mother and stepfather, it is my pleasure to dedicate ‘The Long Nineteenth Century’ to my daughter, son and three grandchildren. This in no way depreciates the love and support of Ann, my wife, not only during the time Theologia Cambrensis has been in preparation, but for the last four-and-a-half decades as well.

D. Densil Morgan

July 2021

Abbreviations

Introduction: The Long Nineteenth Century

According to the historian David Hempton, the confessional age of Europe’s Protestant Reformation came to an end with Pietism and the eighteenth-century revival movements,¹ and the aim of the initial volume of Theologia Cambrensis was to chart the way in which the Reformation truths of sola fides, sola gratia and sola scriptura, ‘faith alone’, ‘grace alone’ and ‘scripture alone’, had registered among the Christians of Wales during that time. The narrative began by relating the way in which Holy Scripture, culminating in Bishop William Morgan’s magisterial vernacular translation of 1588, was made available in the parish churches,² and how biblical religion developed in the Established Church and, following the Civil Wars and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, among the gathered congregations of Protestant Dissent. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the ‘holy living’ motif in High Church teaching had been established as an Anglican norm, while Reformed doctrine, fed by the Pietism of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (the SPCK) and more pointedly by the literary and educational exertions of Griffith Jones, rector of Llanddowror, had also become widespread. The survey concluded by describing the early impact of the post-1735 Evangelical Revival.³

If the subtitle of Volume 1 was ‘From Reformation to Revival’, the title chosen for this volume is ‘The Long Nineteenth Century’. In a way this is an artificial construct as there is no detailed agreement as to when that purported century began, though for most historians it came to an end in 1914.⁴ The choice of 1900 as a closing date is intentional. As well as marking the conventional divide between the nineteenth century and the twentieth, it notes the death of Thomas Charles Edwards, founding principal of the University College at Aberystwyth and an epoch-making figure in the development of modern Welsh theology. Notwithstanding the great religious revival of 1904–5 and the culmination in 1914 of the fractious campaign to disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales, there was indeed much continuity between religion in Wales at the close of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the First World War, yet virtually all the major aspects of later change were in place by 1900. Much valuable scholarship has appeared during the last few decades covering aspects of religion and society in Wales between 1900 and 1914, including fresh studies of the 1904–5 revival,⁵ Nonconformity and the Labour movement,⁶ the disestablishment campaign⁷ and other matters, complementing R. Tudur Jones’s benchmark analysis Faith and the Crisis of a Nation: Wales 1890–1914 which first appeared in 1981–2.⁸ To have included this would have expanded an already extensive narrative to an unacceptable degree. Although life continued as normal until 1914, the religious developments which had occurred by 1900 were, in many cases, incipient in certain significant changes which were already apparent in 1760. In this study, therefore, the nineteenth century begins at that point.

Although the following assessment centres on theology and conceptual developments among Welsh Christians, it does so against the background of considerable social and economic change. In 1760 Wales remained almost wholly agrarian with few large towns and a negligible industrial base. This was soon to change. After 1790 copper smelting in the Swansea Valley, along with iron manufacture in Merthyr Tydfil, Dowlais and the heads of the eastern valleys, would become extensive, with significant population growth and demographic shift. This was especially true of the northern reaches of Glamorgan and the western part of Monmouthshire. Historians have long been exercised as to the nature of the interpenetration between popular religious movements, especially Methodist and Nonconformist revivalism, and rapid social change, and though little consensus has emerged, there is no doubt that the remarkable growth in revival-fed popular religion which characterized Welsh Christianity throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, occurred in such a context.⁹ By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the strength of popular religion, and to an extent its fissiparousness, had become apparent not only through the secession of the Calvinistic Methodist movement from its parent body, the Established Church, but in the transformation of the sober and somewhat marginal Older Dissent into a heady, unrestrained and raucous ‘Nonconformity’. Such was its success that by mid-century, Henry Richard’s ‘nation of Nonconformists’¹⁰ had been born. This did scant justice to the continuing, and indeed strengthening, presence of Welsh Anglicanism and wholly disregarded the fact that over half of the population had no link with organized religion at all, but the myth would remain potent for generations to come.

Neither did the myth encompass the witness of the oldest and most enduring branch of Welsh Christianity, the Catholicism of the Church of Rome. By the mid-eighteenth century ‘the Old Faith’ had been virtually eclipsed in what had once been one of its sturdiest bastions,¹¹ though there would be signs a century later that its presence was once more being felt. In 1760 Welsh Catholics were under the jurisdiction of the vicar apostolic of the Western District, one of the four vicariates in England and Wales established by Pope Innocent XI in 1688. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the only known Catholic missions in Wales were at Holywell in the north and Abergavenny, Pont-hir, Monmouth, Brecon, Chepstow and Usk, all in the border country of the south-east. Domestic chapels were maintained by the landed families of the Mostyns of Talacre, Flintshire, the Herberts of Llanarth and the Vaughans of Courtfield, the last two situated on the Monmouthshire– Herefordshire border. It has been estimated that by that time ‘the total number of [Welsh] Catholics did not exceed a thousand’.¹²

Between then and the restoration of the English and Welsh hierarchy under Pope Pius IX in 1850, Catholic fortunes revived significantly. Mission stations, staffed mostly by Irish clergy, had been set up in the dock towns and rapidly industrializing districts, principally of the south-east, at Swansea in 1813, and thereafter in Cardiff, Pontypool, Merthyr, Newport, Dowlais and Nant-y-glo, to serve the needs of the many incoming Irish labourers and their families, though by the 1840s mass centres had been established in the south-west, at Milford, Haverfordwest, Pembroke Dock and Carmarthen. These were the results of the labours of Fr (later Monsignor) Peter Lewis, a Welsh-speaking native appointed missioner by Bishop Thomas Joseph Brown OSB, first vicar apostolic of the newly created Welsh District in 1840. By 1850, according to The Catholic Directory, there were as many as 10,000 Catholics not only in south Wales but in Holywell and Wrexham in the north-east, and in Bangor and Caernarfon in the north-west: ‘There were 25 missionary priests, with 23 established missions having 21 churches and chapels.’¹³ Indigenous rural Catholics, almost exclusively in Flintshire and Monmouthshire, had been more or less submerged by the Irish influx, though a handful of native-born Welsh-speaking clergy – Fr Edward Richards from the Vale of Glamorgan, and Frs Lewis Havard (an uncle and nephew) from Brecon, along with Fr Peter Lewis, the son of an old recusant family at Nant-y-glo – preserved the link with the older, native tradition.

Following the restoration of the hierarchy, the Welsh District was provided with two sees, namely Shrewsbury encompassing the six north Wales counties along with Herefordshire, and Menevia and Newport covering the southern part of the country. Thomas Joseph Brown inherited the southern diocese, while his namesake (though no relation), Fr James Brown, became first bishop of Shrewsbury.¹⁴ This development, which signified growing confidence within the Catholic community, was feared and resented by non-Catholics. Clearly the cause was expanding in the industrial south and beyond. In north Wales the Jesuits had established themselves at Tremeirchion in 1848, the Capuchin Fathers at nearby Pantasaph in 1852 with further mission centres being founded at St Asaph in 1854, Mold in 1855 and Rhyl in 1863. The conversion of Viscount Feilding, earl of Denbigh, in 1850, and transferral of the soon-to-be-built St David’s Anglican church at Pantasaph which he had sponsored, to the Capuchins, further inflamed sensibilities, as did the later conversion of the Cardiff industrialist and landowner John Crichton-Stuart, the third marquess of Bute, who submitted to Rome in 1868. Although this, or Catholic expansion on a parish level, would hardly imperil the over-whelming supremacy of Welsh Protestantism, the somewhat paranoid anti-Catholic polemic which characterized the later part of the century illustrated vividly Anglican and Nonconformist fears.¹⁵ Catholic confidence was further boosted in 1881 with the appointment of the scholarly and substantial Mgr John Cuthbert Hedley OSB, auxiliary bishop of Menevia and Newport, as T. J. Brown’s successor,¹⁶ and Mgr Edmund Knight’s succession as bishop of Shrewsbury a year later.

The claims of separate nationhood were affirmed in 1895 when the Welsh counties (apart from populous Glamorgan and Monmouthshire) were severed from the structures of the English Church in order to create a new, specifically Welsh, apostolic vicariate. ‘Wales’, stated Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster, at the time, ‘ought to be treated as an independent state rather than a mere appendage of England.’¹⁷ Its leader would be the youthful Fr Francis Joseph Mostyn, son of Sir Pyers Mostyn, eighth baronet, of Talacre and a scion of north Wales’s premier recusant family. In 1898, with the vicariate’s upgrade to a full diocese, taking over the name Menevia from Newport and Menevia, Mostyn would become its bishop; later he would be appointed arch-bishop of Cardiff and first metropolitan of Wales.¹⁸ Yet however gratified indigenous Welsh Catholics felt that Pope Leo XIII had affirmed their cultural identity, the fact remained that the bulk of their co-religionists, in the towns and valleys of the teeming diocese of Newport, were neither Welsh-born nor of Welsh extraction. ‘Bishop Hedley’, according to a later historian of Welsh Catholicism, ‘was very aware that … the missionary challenge was almost entirely an Irish problem.’¹⁹ Be that as it may, by the turn of the century Welsh Catholic life was flourishing:

At the time of the partition of the southern diocese there were in Glamorgan, Monmouthshire and Herefordshire 38 secular and 30 regular priests, 56 churches and chapels, 12 convents and some 45,000 or more Catholics; in the rest of Wales, 19 secular and about 12 effective regular priests, 32 churches and chapels, 4 convents, and some 6000 faithful.²⁰

Although Theologia Cambrensis is almost wholly concerned with the fortunes of Welsh Protestantism, throughout the nineteenth century an increasingly buoyant Welsh Catholicism could not be ignored.

It was hardly possible in 1760 to foretell how Christianity in Wales would develop over the next century and a half. The bulk of the population at the time was either nominally or actively attached to the Established Church with a burgeoning Calvinistic Methodism still staunchly Anglican in its religious commitment. The last thing that Daniel Rowland or Williams Pantycelyn envisaged or desired was to make a breach with the Mother Church. Yet it was the startling success of their ministry, and the structures created to sustain it, that would make secession inevitable within a generation of their demise. The history of the nineteenth century is that of the triumph of popular evangelical religion, the slow post-secession rejuvenation of Welsh Anglicanism, and a counter-development in terms of the sectional growth of rational Dissent on the one hand and High Church sacramentalism on the other.

Although much of this was driven by high emotional energy, at its best Welsh Christianity did not lack intellectual toughness and theological depth. In Thomas Charles, Calvinistic Methodism had a biblical scholar of immense erudition and consummate skill while his closest friend and colleague, Thomas Jones, had an unrivalled grasp of the history and application of Reformed doctrine. A generation later, Lewis Edwards would provide his movement with an ecclesiology that planted it securely within the international family of Reformed churches, and through his college at Bala and on the pages of Y Traethodydd, the scholarly quarterly he founded in 1845, he and others (like Owen Thomas and a galaxy of young, gifted authors) guaranteed not only the inculcation of a broad humane culture, but the maintenance of high intellectual standards. By the end of the century Thomas Charles Edwards, Lewis Edwards’s son and Thomas Charles’s great-grandson, would perpetuate the family tradition by combining first-class scholarship, classical learning and deep experiential piety in order to respond creatively to the theological challenges of the fin-de-siècle. Although attractive to the masses, Welsh Protestantism catered for the head as well as the heart.

Such head religion was that of traditional Western orthodoxy, and for the most part Calvinist to boot. Inevitably, perhaps, an overemphasis on orthodoxy and a restrictive rather than expansive Calvinism bred reaction, in terms of Wesleyan Arminianism on the one hand and rational Dissent on the other. A section of the Older Dissent, when not transformed by the revivalist spirit, became ever more heterodox, moving through a rational, cerebral Arminianism into Arianism and soon into full-blown Unitarianism. This occurred mostly among the Cardiganshire Presbyterians and a few congregations of anti-Trinitarian Baptists in the rural south-west. (The warm, believing Arminianism of John Wesley’s Welsh disciples, though, remained explicitly evangelical and partook fully of the benefits of the revival). A parallel reaction occurred among the Baptist followers of J. R. Jones of Ramoth, north Wales, whose revolt against popular evangelicalism took them in the direction of an intellectualist ‘Sandemanianism’ which prized the letter of scripture over a heartfelt faith. But these were minority concerns.

More significant was the curious decline of Calvinism, which by the end of the century had become marked. The vigorous soteriological debates of the early decades had created a moderate Calvinistic consensus holding in balance God’s elective grace, the all-sufficiency of Christ’s atonement and sacrificial death, and the uninhibited call of the gospel to the whole of humankind. By the 1870s there were signs that the consensus was cracking, among the Congregationalists and Baptists most markedly, and that thereafter Calvinism lacked the wherewithal to respond to the challenges of a changing world. ‘The Welsh Baptists used to be pronounced Calvinists’, wrote one commentator in reviewing the great Dutch scholar Abraham Kuyper’s famous Lectures on Calvinism in 1900. ‘I wouldn’t venture to say what they, or anyone else, are by now. In our great zeal to keep up with the world, I wonder whether we have not left something fairly significant behind?’²¹

In Anglican circles, the response to nineteenth-century developments took a different path. The Calvinistic Methodist secession of 1811 left a huge void in the life of the Established Church, and although evangelical witness would later revive, structural weaknesses, a detached, remote and Anglicized episcopate, and conventional ‘high and dry’ churchmanship could not compete with the vibrant populism of a surging Nonconformity. Renewal, when it arrived, was facilitated through the influence, after 1833, of the High Church Tractarianism of the Oxford Movement, the missionary exertions of the gospel clergy replicating in the parish churches the vibrancy of evangelical Dissent, and following the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Acts of 1840 and 1841, radical structural changes and considerable financial support. The prime minister William Ewart Gladstone’s policy of appointing Welsh-born and Welsh-speaking bishops, beginning with Joshua Hughes at St Asaph in 1870, would also aid the Church’s efforts to win the people back.

By the end of the long nineteenth century Christianity in Wales was both a kaleidoscope and a mosaic. The aim of the following narrative is to describe its activities and assess its weaknesses and strengths.

1

1760–1790

The theology of Calvinistic Methodism

On 27 April 1764, David Lloyd, minister of the Presbyterian church at Llwynrhydowen, Cardiganshire, informed his brother Posthumus of a spiritual awakening which had recently been experienced among the county’s Methodists:

The Methodists after having kept quiet for several years have of late been very active. Their number increases, and their wild pranks are beyond description. The worship of the day being over, they have kept together in the place whole nights singing, capering, bawling, fainting, thumping and a variety of other exercises. The whole country for many miles around have crowded to see such strange sights. For some months past they are less talked of, whether they have grown quieter or the thing is no longer a novelty I do not know, nor had I the curiosity to go near them at all.¹

The awakening, which probably began early in 1762 and has been referred to by subsequent historians as the ‘Llangeitho Revival’,² had been engendered by a fresh potency in the preaching of Daniel Rowland, curate of Llangeitho, some twenty miles north-east of Llwynrhydowen, and the publication of William Williams Pantycelyn’s hymn collection entitled Caniadau y Rhai sydd ar y Môr o Wydr (‘Songs of those who are on the Sea of Glass’), a reference to the words of John the Divine in Revelation 4:6 and 15:2, and the author’s finest hymn collection to date.³

Welsh Calvinistic Methodism had been in a fairly subdued state since the rupture between Howell Harris, the revivalist, and his colleagues a decade or so earlier,⁴ while the awakening with its twin emphases of exuberant praise (including singing) and hearty response to the preached Word, gave the whole movement new heart.

The sharp rise in the spiritual temperature coincided with Harris’s reconciliation, in February 1763, with his former partners, and he was pleased to be asked to resume his itinerancy at such a propitious time. ‘I heard of much awakening in the country’, he recorded in his diary on 6 April, ‘and am asked to go to all the old places again.’⁵ The central place which the converts gave to song struck Harris forcibly: ‘The Lord [has] awakened many in these parts by a spirit of singing’, he had written a week earlier, ‘who continue whole nights in that exercise’;⁶ and again on 1 April: ‘Such rejoicing and singing I never saw.’⁷ While at Llangeitho on 5 May, even his exhortation had to be curtailed: ‘There came such a spirit of singing, rejoicing, and leaping for joy as made me desist.’⁸ By then Harris was not only back in favour but contributing freely to the movement’s activities. Despite the tensions that had prevailed between them in 1752,⁹ Williams Pantycelyn readily admitted that his erstwhile colleague’s contribution to Welsh Methodism had been missed, and that in his absence, spirituality had waned. ‘Till the Lord did come with these late showers of revival’, Williams recorded in August, ‘all was gone to nothing.’¹⁰ In all, the movement’s leaders were relieved to welcome the revivalist back into the fold.

It was not only the liberal Arminians of Llwynrhydowen who were perturbed by the excesses of the new converts. The orthodox Calvinist Thomas Morgan, formerly minister among the Independents of Henllan Amgoed, Carmarthenshire, and an early convert of Howell Harris, was appalled by the physical manifestations which had come to characterize Methodist worship. The Methodists, he claimed on 13 March 1764, were ‘stark mad and given up to a spirit of delusion to the great disgrace and scandal of Christianity’.¹¹ Along with the generational divide between Lloyd, Morgan and the young converts, Older Dissenting decorum prohibited any appreciation of the potentially positive aspects of the renewal. ‘May the Lord pity the poor Dissenters’, Morgan continued; ‘I am afraid some of them will fall away by that strong wind of temptation.’¹² For all their support of these boisterous activities, the leaders of the movement were not blind to the problems they entailed. Indeed Williams Pantycelyn resorted to prose in order to justify the converts’ unrestrained vigour and to assess the validity of the revival as a whole. His twin volumes Llythyr Martha Philopur (‘A Letter from Martha Philopur’) (1762) and its reply Ateb Philo-Evangelius (‘Philo-Evangelius’ Reply’) (1763), constituted a new phase in Welsh theological literature.

Pantycelyn’s prose works (i): Llythyr Martha Philopur and Ateb Philo-Evangelius

Apart from his translation of a treatise by the Scots Calvinist Ebenezer Erskine in 1759, Williams was known as a hymnist and poet and not as a writer of prose, yet such was the need to defend the revival and to instruct its often overzealous converts, that he took up his pen to do both. Written in the form of a dialogue between Martha, a young convert, and her mentor Philo-Evangelius, this is the first time ever for the female experience to be portrayed in the narrative of Welsh religion. Although women had constituted much of the membership of the Older Dissenting churches and must have been well represented among the congregations of the parish churches as well, it took religious historians of the late twentieth century to begin to give them their due.¹³ What is striking in Martha’s letter is the description of the conversion experience, the agonies of conviction leading to the ecstasy of redemption, conveyed in terms so vivid as to be unprecedented in the literature of inward piety in Welsh:¹⁴

When my soul was in the direst distress, daytime dawned for me. There came to me in a moment the sensation that my sin had been forgiven, I received the Word with the utmost joy, even more than a prisoner would feel were he released from the very foot of the gallows. I could hardly believe that heaven itself contained anything of like nature that I now felt within myself. I know now that my needs have been fulfilled completely. My lot, yes, my everlasting lot, is with the living God.¹⁵

With consummate psychological perceptiveness, Williams shows that the exuberance of the young converts was not the result of hysteria or a matter of ‘wild pranks’ or ‘a spirit of delusion’, but the inevitable consequence of the working of the Holy Spirit, on the minds and emotions of impressionable people certainly, but those who had been stirred to the very depths of their soul. The dancing, crying and jumping that scandalized their more staid (and older) non-Methodist contemporaries was not a matter of superficial emotionalism but, as Martha explained, it touched the will, the conscience, the understanding as well as the passions:

My flesh and all that is in me rejoice in the living God. The first moment that I have the opportunity, with the love of the Lord burning within, and I give vent to my spiritual yearnings, it is natural for me to shout out the praises of the Lord, to bless and honour my God, to jump and leap in delight, in such a great salvation as this, the like of which I have never experienced before.¹⁶

Martha tells her mentor that thousands of her fellow youth had been touched by this spirit of praise, and she had heard that the older minsters had seen nothing like it before. Being conscious of the novelty of her experience and stung by the standoffishness of traditional religious professors, she craved the need for guidance and instruction. Did not the Bible itself call the faithful to rejoice? Having ransacked scripture she had seen that all Christian people had been commanded to worship God with heart, voice and song, that the Old Testament saints, the Psalmists, the prophets and not least King David who danced before the ark, and New Testament believers from the Day of Pentecost onwards, proved that the spirit of revival was no new thing. Novel it may have been in the context of mid-eighteenth-century Wales, but it was hardly unparalleled in the history of God’s people during Bible times.

In replying to Martha, Philo-Evangelius admitted readily that not all the excitement among the worshippers was genuinely spiritual, but that did not invalidate the revival as a whole: ‘Some disorder, the passions of nature being mixed with the stirrings of grace, does not disprove one whit that the Lord is in this work that began recently in the souls of so many young people, and is still spreading so successfully.’¹⁷ Scripture itself says that in each harvest there will be tares along with the wheat, and that when the wind of the Spirit blows so strongly it will affect hypocrites as well as the truly godly. However helpful pastorally Martha found these words, of greater significance was Williams’s theory of revivalism, for it was here that he first lays out what would become known as ‘the Methodist view of history’.¹⁸ ‘God …’, he claimed

had been a stranger in the land for many a long year. The Spirit of the Lord had forsaken whole congregations, ministers preached to the stones. Deadness of spirit, worldliness, barren debates, conceit, self-regard and a host of poisonous insects were like locusts laying the land to waste … Hatred, malice and prejudice reigned, it was night, night, night throughout the churches.¹⁹

Williams admitted that the gospel was being preached and that conscientious ministers did proclaim the Word, though the effect they had was practically nil: ‘Though there were trumpets among them, some of which were golden, virtually no-one listened to their voice, from Holyhead to Cardiff.’²⁰ Hyperbole this may have been, and a grave injustice to the quiet, parish-based renewal connected with Griffith Jones and his circulating schools, and the undoubted if lower-key vitality which still characterized evangelical Dissent,²¹ yet for all those whose lives had been so dramatically transformed by the current awakening, this view did resonate: ‘O! Martha, Martha, the day now has dawned. The Lord has breathed on the dry bones, and they have come alive.’²²

On the basis of his experience with the Methodist movement for decades, Williams developed a theory that revivalistic activity affected the churches in cycles. Well versed in both Protestant history and Puritan divinity, he already read the story of Christianity in terms of declension and renewal. For over two centuries after Pentecost the Church had flourished, but with the Constantinian pact of AD 313, decline had set in, religion had become formalized, unscriptural rites choked true spirituality and the Church of Rome had become anti-Christian. And so things had continued for nearly a millennium until the stirrings of renewal, first in thirteenth-century Italy with Peter Waldo, then with Jan Hus in Bohemia a century later, with Jerome of Prague in the Czech lands and with John Wycliffe in England. This led to rejuvenation under Luther and the Reformation, but by the seventeenth century decline had once more set in. Despite flickers of renewal, lethargy had undermined the witness of both the Church of England and Dissent though more recently a startling revitalization had occurred: ‘In the year 1738 or thereabouts the light of dawn broke out in many places throughout the world.’²³ Having read the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), ‘the textbook for revivalists everywhere’,²⁴ Williams applied his theory of cyclical renewal to the evangelical awakenings which had been experienced more recently in Scotland, England and the American colonies as well as in his native land, in order to provide his fellow Methodists with their own specific identity: ‘Then O, wondrous morning, the sun shone on Wales!’²⁵ If regression had occurred during the 1750s with the withdrawal of Howell Harris (though his name is not mentioned), God had shown mercy once more with the present renewal through which ‘the whole place by now is suffused with the presence of the Lord’.²⁶ It was this revival which had brought salvation to Martha and so many of her contemporaries, causing them to dance with joy.

Pantycelyn’s long poems: Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist and Theomemphus

As well as assuring the new converts of the validity of their experience, Williams provided them with what was, in effect, a systematic theology in verse. The year 1764 saw the publication of an expanded edition of his remarkable long poem Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist (‘A View of Christ’s Kingdom’) which had first appeared eight years earlier. Comprising 1,366 stanzas in six chapters each subdivided into different sections, the epic portrayed not only the creation of the world through Christ, the divine Logos, its maintenance in history through God’s good providence, the coming of the Son as the divine redeemer, his death and resurrection, leading to his return in glory when all things will be renewed, the kingdom being returned to the Father with God becoming all in all. As panoramic as Dante’s Divina Commedia and as comprehensive as Milton’s Paradise Lost, it was, according to the literary critic Saunders Lewis, a ‘summa theologica in verse’.²⁷ The opening chapter describes the kingdom being presented to the pre-existent Son in eternity through whom all things will be made and, foreseeing the Fall in Adam, Christ being elected as saviour of humankind. Although the concept of election is well to the fore throughout the opening section’s sixty-nine stanzas, it occurs always and everywhere in the context of Christ’s all-embracing Person and Work. As with Pantycelyn’s hymns, the Christological emphasis is exceptional and in such an extended poetic treatise as this, quite unprecedented: ‘What gives the poem its particular flavour is the dramatic nature of the Son’s contribution. Our gaze is fixed constantly on him.’²⁸ The second section’s seventy-three stanzas have to do with the covenant of redemption between the Father and the Son in eternity, while Williams, in a footnote, warns against the danger of tritheism or an overemphasis on the role of the three specific persons of the Trinity at the expense of the divine unity: ‘The doctrine of the Trinity is as obvious in the New Testament as that of the redemption of humankind, but it is very easy here to mix errors with the most momentous and clearest of truths.’²⁹

Chapter Two invites the reader to observe Christ setting up his kingdom in which He is everything in creation including the creation of Adam or humankind in innocence:

Duw! help fy enaid egwan i ddringo fry i’r lan,

A rho fy nhraed sy’n crynu i sefyll ar ryw fan

Uwch bannau mwya’r ddaear, a rho ’sbienddrych mawr

I weld fy Iesu’n gosod seilfaenau’r byd i lawr.

(Permit, O God, I pray Thee, my trembling feet to stand / On the world’s highest mountain, and let me have to hand / A telescope to show me my Jesus at his task / Of laying the world’s foundation! This only, Lord, I ask.) (Chapter Two, section 1, stanza 2)

The mention of the telescope is highly significant, illustrating not only Williams’s deep fascination with the latest scientific theories, but the fact that the Enlightenment was already having a profound impact on the Evangelical Revival,³⁰ even in Wales. The threat of an incipient Deism may have been in the background, but what is certain is Pantycelyn’s confidence in the sovereignty of God in both creation and redemption and its consistency with the most recent scientific findings in both biology and astronomy. However stirring the poetry, the most striking parts of Chapter Two are the numerous extended footnotes, more in the character of short essays, explaining the wonders of the stars, planets and vast distances of the cosmos, along with the most microscopic aspects of the natural world.³¹ His authority was William Derham’s Psycho-theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from the Works of Creation (1713), and Astro-theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from a Survey of the Heavens (1715). Derham (1657–1735), clergyman and natural philosopher, fellow of the Royal Society and canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, was a friend of both Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, whose Boyle Lectures at St Mary Le Bow, London, in 1711–12 (which formed the basis for these volumes) showed how the latest scientific discoveries underscored rather than undermined orthodox theology and the biblical revelation of Christ as the mediator of creation. The way in which Williams sustains his muse throughout these numerous stanzas is remarkable, and however central the creation motif, it is never allowed to eclipse that of redemption:

Y dyffryn yn dwyn gwelltydd i borthi’r ’nifail glân,

Y gwastad dir yn llwythog o bob rhinweddol râ’n;

Cynhaliaeth dyn ardderchog, maeth i’r creadur sy’n

Naill ai yn gwasanaethu, neu ynteu’n porthi dyn.

Ond eto ei ras sydd lawer fwy na’r mynyddau’r byd,

Y bryniau yn y lleuad, a’u pwyso oll ynghyd,

Llydanach na’r gwastadedd, can mwy na gwaith ei law

Oedd marw tros ei bobol ar ben Calfaria draw.

(The valley yielding plenty to feed the needy beast / The plain awash with goodness, its virtue as a feast; / Providing sustenance and nourishment all ’round / Whether serving men or feeding them, each one to abound.

Yet ever more than mountains is the plenitude of grace, / More than the moon’s craters, in the widest space, / Wider than the prairies, far more than all he wrought / The sacrifice on Calvary for others which he bought.) (Chapter Two, section 4, stanzas 15 and 16)

The theme of Chapter Three, the shortest in the poem with a mere forty-eight stanzas, is the so-called pactum salutis or covenant between God the Father and God the Son, in eternity, to redeem the elect through his sacrificial death, taking the form of a verse exposition of the protoevangelion in Gen. 3:15: ‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.’³² Chapter Four with its 181 stanzas contains an extended treatment of the doctrine of providence, while the 149 stanzas of Chapter Five, ‘The statute-book of Christ’s kingdom, or Christ as all things in the Bible’, is a luxuriant exercise in biblical typology. The climax comes in the 362 stanzas of Chapter Six, ‘Christ’s special kingdom, or Christ as all things in the salvation of his saints’. Christ is both saviour and judge, through his death and resurrection, victory is vouchsafed for his chosen people, while following his return in glory, the divine Son presents the kingdom to the Father and God’s will for his creation is fulfilled. In all, this epic was unique both in the history of Welsh literature and of the nation’s theology, and a benchmark for the worldview of the emergent Methodist movement: ‘The work was not only an original and ambitious presentation of a noble theme, it was also definitive for the new type of Christian emerging in Wales under the name of Calvinistic Methodist.’³³

Just as Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist described the work of God in creation and redemption, Williams’s second epic poem, Bywyd a Marwolaeth Theomemphus, o’i Enedigaeth i’w Fedd (‘The Life and Death of Theomemphus, from his Birth to his Death’) which also appeared in 1764, treated the work of God’s Spirit in the individual soul. It had no precedent, as far as he knew, whether in Welsh, English or Latin, and although unparalleled, the project had been remarkably effort-free: ‘This book issued forth from my spirit like water from a fountain or a spider’s web from its belly.’³⁴ An immense dramatic poem, it relates the spiritual pilgrimage of Theomemphus, ‘Seeker after God’, a rep-resentative Methodist, detailing his doubts, fears, conviction of sin and conversion, thereafter his temptations, backslidings, growth in grace and comfort in death. Steeped in Puritan conscience literature and indebted to Bunyan’s allegory, ‘Theomemphus is a kind of Welsh Pilgrim’s Progress in rhyme.’³⁵ Like Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist, it too was unique in the history of Welsh letters, and a milestone in the development of the nation’s religious verse. Its twenty chapters and some 1,500 stanzas make it longer than the earlier poem, and its principal interest in mapping the history of Welsh theology (rather than religious psychology³⁶) is in its analysis of conversionist preaching and its treatment of the doctrinal disputes with which Williams, as a former Dissenter, had grown up.

Theomemphus’ conviction of sin occurs through his listening to Boanerges, ‘Son of Thunder’, expound the divine law. Whether a reflection of Williams’s own conviction as a young man under the preaching of Howell