Establishers of Welsh Methodism

These two ministers deserve some attention.  The Rev. Owen Davies was born in Wrexham in 1752.  He knew something of the influence of the gospel when, very young, on hearing Mr. John Gardner, an assistant preacher with the Wesleyans, but his father would not allow him to join that Connexion.  It was not long before he moved to London and was, there, convicted and saved.  He joined the society at Brentford and began preaching at Mile End.  Before this time, he had married a widow who kept a school at Ealing.  Soon after his conversion, John Wesley tried to persuade him to give himself wholly to preaching.  For some time, he hesitated because he was a married man, but Mr. Wesley gained the day.  His first circuit was Manchester; afterwards, he was superintendent at Penzance and Redruth in Cornwall, and his labors were much blessed.  He could speak a mongrel Welsh but could not preach in that language, and this proved a great disadvantage to him in his work.

John Hughes was a man of considerable ability who had received more of an education than was usual.  He was born in Brecon on May 18, 1776.  His father was a respectable tradesman in the town and had provided the best education for his son in the hope that he would become a clergyman.  But, when John Hughes was thirteen, Dr. Coke came to preach in Brecon.  The boy went to hear him and the sermon affected him deeply.  The following year, he joined the Wesleyan society in the town, laying aside completely any thought of ministry in the Established Church.  He started preaching amongst the Wesleyans at a very young age and, in 1796, he was appointed to the Cardiff circuit.  As we have seen, he was sent, by Conference in 1800, as a missioner to Wales.

These are the men who were instrumental in establishing Welsh Wesleyanism – Mr. Edward Jones, Bathafarn, and the Revs. John Bryan, Owen Davies, and John Hughes…

From: The Calvinist Methodist Fathers of Wales by John Morgan Jones and William Morgan; translated from the Welsh by John Aaron; 2 volumes (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2008 [1890-1897]), 2:371.

 

On Methodism

Yet, it came to need the force of a new spirit, and it found it (without entirely liking it) in Methodism, the one great movement of Hanoverian religion, originating inside the Church [of England] and only reluctantly parting from it.  Influenced by their father’s High Church devotion and by the passion of William Law’s “[A] Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life” (1728; one of the century’s great books), John [1703-1791] and Charles [1706-1788] Wesley instilled into their followers in England and the American colonies an urgent sense of religious experience, a sense which shocked more sedate believers by manifestations of frenzy and physical convulsions.  Since the Church had subsided into plain sense and reason, and since Dissent now tempered with sobriety its former righteous and godly zeal, there was, indeed, a psychological need for Methodism and for certain other similar evangelical movements, just as the whole social-reasonable temper of the time was coming to need the deeper emotions of the nineteenth century.  Methodism broke, like a sudden storm, across the placid sky of Anglicanism, reminding men of fundamental power and of sin and salvation.  One side of it was Calvinistic and worked through dread (this, unfortunately, was the side of evangelicalism which afflicted Cowper), but the Wesleys’ own message was Arminian, the doctrine of salvation for all, bringing a sense of sin but, in the very process, a simultaneous sense of divine mercy…

To call the Methodist, and kindred movements, parallels to Romanticism is to beg some large questions but is not really untrue.  Hanoverian religion had many faults – an episcopate wedded to politics, an impoverished lower clergy, dull orthodoxy and Dissent, a skeptical world of fashion, and an hysterical evangelical resurgence.  Yet, with all its faults, it contributed much more valuably to the outlook of the time than has been customarily allowed; it inspired much scholarly and pastoral devotion, and much in the way of Christian apologetics.  Sermons and theological works abounded, and many of the most popular and impressive hymns date from the period from Bishop Ken to William Cowper.

From: “The Social Setting,” by A. R. Humphreys, in The Pelican Guide to English Literature: Volume 4: From Dryden to Johnson, edited by Boris Ford; 2nd edition (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963 [1957]), pp. 41, 42.

 

Sir Walter Scott on the Methodists

Above all, the character of Ezekiel Daw - though the outline must have been suggested by that of Abraham Adams – is so well distinguished by original and spirited conception that it may pass for an excellent original.  The Methodists, as they abhor the lighter arts of literature and, perhaps, contemn those which are more serious have, as might have been expected, met much rough usage at the hands of novelists and dramatic authors, who generally represent them either as idiots or hypocrites.  A very different feeling is due to many, perhaps to most, of this enthusiastic sect; nor is it rashly to be inferred that he who makes religion the general object of his life is, for that sole reason, to be held either a fool or an imposter.  The professions of strict piety are inconsistent with open vice and, therefore, must, in the general case, lead men to avoid the secret practice of what, openly known, must be attended with loss of character; and, thus, the Methodists, and other rigid sectaries, oppose to temptation the strong barriers of interest and habitual restraint, in addition to those restrictions which religion and morality impose on all men.  The touch of enthusiasm connected with Methodism renders it a species of devotion, warmly affecting the feelings and, therefore, peculiarly calculated to operate upon the millions of ignorant poor, whose understandings the most learned divines would, in vain, address by mere force of argument; and, doubtless, many such simple enthusiasts as Ezekiel Daw, by their well-meant and indefatigable exertions amongst the stubborn and ignorant, have been the instruments of Providence to call such men from a state of degrading and brutal profligacy to a life more worthy of rational beings, and of the name of Christians.  Thus, thinking, we are of opinion that the character of Ezekiel Daw, which shows the Methodist preacher in his strength and in his weakness – bold and fervent when in discharge of his mission; simple, well-meaning, and even absurd, in the ordinary affairs of life – is not only an exquisite, but a just portrait.

From: “Richard Cumberland,” in The Lives of the Novelists by Sir Walter Scott; reprinted in the Everyman’s Library series (with an introduction by George Saintsbury) (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910), pp. 137-138.  The Lives of the Novelists, a series of biographies of the novelists included in a collection of their works reprinted by Scott’s publisher, was originally published in the early 1820s.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the most famous and the most important Scottish novelist of the first half of the 19th century.  Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), though now virtually totally forgotten, was a prolific 18th and early 19th century playwright and novelist.