23 JANUARY 1892, Page 25

The Older Nonconformity of Wrexham. By Alfred Neobald Palmer. (Woodall,

Minshall, and Thomas, Wrexham.)—The curious in the religious movements of the country and the world should read this volume, which has a general and British, as well as a local and North Welsh interest, if only for the account that is given in it of the remarkable mystic, Morgan Lloyd o Wynedd. Morgan Lloyd seems to have been, in the first place, the Puritan Vicar of Wrexham, and to have resigned that office during or before the year 1657, to become the first Congregational minister in the place, and the virtual founder of Nonconformity. Some extracts are given by the author of this book from Lloyd's " Llyfr y tri Aderyn," or " Book of the Three Birds," a work, to some extent of a biographi- cal character, which was published in 1653. In this Lloyd seems to maintain that the heavenly nature is itself Paradise, while "the carnal nature, in which self is uncrucified, is itself Hell." This idea or conceit leads into prose-poetry like :—" Men are as the birds singing in the tree, that know not the root that is in them. The holy souls that slept in God are quiet in the silent light every- where before his face, and outside the spirit of the world, awaiting the moving of the body, through the stirring of the root of nature." Morgan Lloyd is in every sense the most important of the almost innumerable characters that figure in this volume. But it is in all respects interesting. If there were many more books of its kind, the writing of an accurate history of religious and eccle- siastical movements in England would come within the range of possible achievement.