Why are the Welsh, People Alienated /rota the Church A
Sermon. By Henry T. Edwards, M.A., Dean of Bangor. Preached in St. David's (Welsh) Church, Liverpool, Sunday, May 25th, 1878. (Rivingtons and Co.)—This is a very masterly discourse, which' we cordially recommend to the studyof all statesmen and Churchmen. The sermon contains some pessages of great eloquence. We would especially note the one in which the preacher speaks of "the moment," at one of the Welsh open-air religious assemblages, " when the strong wind of some native prophet's fervid eloquence has swept over their souls, in rhythmic gusts, stirring to their inmost recesses all the deeps of mystic emotion in their being, and when one can hardly fail to be borne back in thought to the woodland shrines of their forefathers ; while in the gleams of severe joy, breaking through clouds and darkness, at once lighting up and melting the melancholy features, which, by long mental gazing at the hard, gloomy, loveless image into which ultra-Calvinism changes the glory of the loving God, have themselves been changed from sadness to sadness, into the same image of leaden gloom, the spectator ninst have recognised the spiritual successors of those natural sun- beams that pierced the shadows of the Druidical groves, streaming as smiles from 'the Face of the Sun '—in the words of their ancient motto—and as glances from the Eye of to relieve the eombre enthusiasm of an ever-devout, God-seeking race." But it is mot as a piece of glowing oratory---and Dean Edivardais a Celt cif the Celts—that we value the present pulpit utterance. It is because it supplies a lucid and convincing answer to the question,— Why are the Welsh of to-day so largely lost to the National Church ? while the author is sanguine enough to believe, as we ourselves also are, that when light shall have been thrown upon the real state of the Welsh Church, when duo consideration shall have been given to the fact that Welsh is still the mother-tongue of over a million souls—that is, of nearly five-sixths of the inhabitants of Wales—and that it is the language in which three-fourthe of them till Worship God, efficacious remedies may yet be found for the mitigation or general absorption of a dissidence 'which has been oc- casioned almost entirely by English neglect of the needs and claims of our Cymric brethren. Dean Edwards has succeeded in giving a luminous as well as a most pathetic narrative of the treatment to which the Welsh have been subjected in spiritual matters since the days of the Norman kings. As early as 1100 A.D., a petition, signed by several of the native princes, was addreased to the Pope, com- plaining of the conduct of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in "sending them, as a matter of course, English bishops, who aro ignorant of the
and who cannot preach the word of manners and customs of the land,
God to the people." But after long experience of injustice, the Welsh found a now day dawning over them when a ‘Velsh dynasty, the off- spring of Owain Tudor, the Anglesey squire of Plus Ponmynydd, rose to the throne of England, and from 1547 to 1700 the Church so faith- fully discharged her duty throughout the Principelity—being as Welsh to the Welsh—that the Welsh, almost as one man,, accepted the Reformation, and that at the beginning of the eightecuth century, with the exception of thirty-six Separatist congregations, the entire people of Wales adhered to the Church. The House of Brunswick inaugurated a very different, and as it could scarcely fail to prove, a most fatal policy. Bishops and Deans, and other ecclesiastical fnnetionaries, were set over the netiVes, while utterly ignorant of their language and traditions ; and what happened from a like cause in Ireland, at the time of the Reformation, has only too striking a parallel in the ecclesiastical condition of Wales now, with this difference,—that the latter has become Nonconformist, while thei Irish were driven into the arms of the Papacy. The thirty-six Welsh meeting.liouses of 1700 have betioine nearly 3,000 in 1870.•
The story needs no comment,. and no subject could more worthily occupy the attention ot the forthcoming- Church Congress at. S wansea, than that which is so ably diseussed by the- Dean of Bangor in the present discourse. We will only. add that . we can commend its theology and spiritualityl aa-mueh as its true patriotism.
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