Seal of the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales. Click on images to enlarge them.
he year 1811 is an important milestone in the history of Welsh Dissent in that it witnessed the secession of the Calvinistic Methodists from the Established Church to become a separate Nonconformist denomination. Howell Harris had died in 1773 and Daniel Rowland in 1790, and however reluctant the next generation of Methodist leaders, Thomas Charles of Bala especially, were not to sever the link with the Anglican Church, the break with the parent body had become inevitable. “What strikes my mind with great force,” wrote Thomas Jones of Denbigh, the Methodists’ premier theologian, in 1810, “is that ... I do not recollect seeing a visible church described by any writer but as a congregation of people having the Word of God truly preached and the sacraments duly administered among them.” For two generations the sacraments had been administered not by Methodists for Methodists in their fellowship meetings but in the parish churches, frequently by parish clergy who had scant sympathy for Methodist teachings. With the passing of the Episcopally-ordained Methodist clergy and the burgeoning popularity of the younger Methodist preachers, there was a clamour for the Welsh Methodists to ordain ministers for themselves. “That compelling of any of our members,” continued Jones, “to seek for either of sacraments from without the pale of our own connection is a thing we ought not to be guilty of, as being contrary to the Word of God and to the universal custom of the churches of God in every age and every country” (qtd in Morgan 2011a 26).
The time was ripe for the Methodists to pronounce themselves not an unofficial sect nominally attached to the Anglican Church but a functioning church in their own right. Consequently, on 19 June 1811, in the north Wales town of Bala, Thomas Charles, a clergyman of the Church of England and (along with Thomas Jones) the movement’s undisputed leader, ordained eight Calvinistic Methodist preachers to administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Two months later, in Llandeilo, south Wales, he repeated the process ordaining a further 13 preachers (Jones, Schlenther and White 223-232). The Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Connexion, or what would become the Presbyterian Church of Wales, had been born. By then the Connexion was the largest popular religious grouping in Wales. Although detailed statistics for membership are not available, between 1763 and 1814, 407 new meeting houses or chapel buildings were erected ensuring the Calvinistic Methodist presence throughout Wales and among the expatriate Welsh in London and the great conurbations of the English Midlands. By the same year (1814) the Welsh Independent churches had risen to 257 while Baptist membership rose from 14,600 in 1810 to 21,499 a decade later (Roberts 223-232; R. Tudur Jones 149; Bassett 211). By this time the Wesleyan Methodists were also making significant inroads, especially into north-east Wales, the Vale of Clwyd and north Cardiganshire (Madden 23-38). This was the golden age of preaching with such exquisite exemplars of the craft as the Baptist Christmas Evans, the Calvinistic Methodist John Elias (1774-1841) and the Independent William Williams of Wern, near Wrexham (1781-1840) forging Wales’s reputation as being the home of “preaching second to no other under the sun” (Griffith 61-83).
Left: Thomas Jones of Denbigh. Middle: Thomas Charles of Bala . Both from The life of the Rev. Thomas Charles, B.A. of Bala (1908). Right: William Rees. From Welsh religious leaders in the Victorian era edited by J. Vyrnwy Morgan (1905).
By the latter part of the Victorian era the ideal of Wales as “the land of the preacher” had been well established, with increasingly romanticized volumes such as David Davies’ Echoes from the Welsh Hills, or Reminiscences of the Preachers and People of Wales (1883) and Owen Jones’ Some of the Great Preachers of Wales (1886), maintaining the stereotype. Although gospel preaching remained an effective force in Nonconformist life, by the end of the period the emphasis on oratorical performance and homiletic technique was in danger of threatening the spiritual integrity of the message. Preaching was accompanied by hymn singing causing Nonconformist Wales also to be known as “the land of song.” Popular revivalism had been fueled by vocal praise, and where Williams Pantycelyn had led, others followed. The cymanfa ganu or communal singing festival dates from this period. It has been said that “[t]he development of the cymanfa ganu in the nineteenth century probably did more than anything to promote the proverbial Welsh love of congregational singing: it encouraged the learning of tunes in four parts and gave vent to powerful singing and powerful emotions” (Griffiths 141).
In all, Nonconformity was rapidly becoming the chosen religious option of a large percentage of the Welsh people and it was still growing. What Tudur Jones says of the Independents was true of evangelical Dissent as a whole: “Between 1800 and 1850 there was a tremendous increase in the number of Congregational churches in Wales. Nothing like it had been seen before, and nothing like it has been seen since. For a period of half a century a new cause was established, on average, every five weeks” (149). By mid-century, the feeling that Nonconformity had overtaken the Established Church as the premier medium of religious expression among the Welsh was proved to be factually true by the results of the Religious Census of 1851. In the seven south Wales counties of Monmouthshire, Glamorgan, Breconshire, Radnorshire, Carmarthenshire, Cardiganshire and Pembrokeshire, 71,156 worshippers were recorded as having attended services in Independent chapels, 68,334 in Baptist chapels and 52,511 among the Calvinistic Methodists. This does not include the smaller denominations such as the Moravians, the Quakers, Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion or the Mormons. In the six north Wales counties of Montgomeryshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire, Merioneth, Caernarfonshire and Anglesey, there were 27,947 Independent worshippers, 13,651 Baptists, not including the so called “Scotch” or Sandemanian Baptists, and as many as 69,304 attendees at Calvinistic Methodist churches. This meant there were 81,984 Baptists, 99,103 Independents and 121,855 Calvinistic Methodists at services on census Sunday. In other words, four-fifths of all worshippers in Wales were outside the pale of the Established Church.
Left: Edward Morgan. From Coviant y Parchedig Eward Morgan, Dyffryn (1905). Middle: Edward Williams, DD from Edward Williams, DD His Life Thought and Influence by W. T. Owen . Right: John Jones of Tal-Sarn, From John Peter, Enwogion y ffydd by John Peter. (1908).
The spate of local revivals culminating in the Great Revival of 1859 meant that more and more ordinary people were being swept into the Dissenting congregations which, for nearly two generations, would leave the Established Church virtually bereft. These people were, on the whole, less educated than previous generations and less well-off though even then the very poor, like the very rich, would never become the denizens of Welsh Nonconformity. This massive popularity brought losses as well as gains. The high ecclesiasticism of the older Dissent gave way to an individualized evangelicalism which had less time for the communal aspect of the church covenant and its specific discipline, while theology itself became more pragmatic in tone. The bulk of the preachers (the Wesleyans apart) remained Calvinist, though their creed became attenuated, reflecting the “New System” of Edward Williams (1750-1830) and the Independents, the “Fullerism” of the Tredegar minister J. P. Davies (1786-1832) and the Baptists – replicating in a Welsh language idiom the doctrinal scheme of the Kettering theologian Andrew Fuller, – and the moderate Calvinism which was championed among the Calvinistic Methodists by John Jones Tal-sarn (1796-1857) and others. This in turn led to a more aggressive emphasis on human choice, first in procuring salvation and then in the social and political realm. Preachers began to challenge the older scheme which stressed the exclusiveness of the elect and the individual’s helplessness in the face of the divine decree, reminding hearers of their absolute moral responsibility to yield to the gospel call. Even the revivals employed “the new measures” including direct preaching, specific exhortation and the need for an immediate public response to the preached message (Carwardine 463-80).
Social and Political Implications of New Emphases
This had implications in the social and political realm. The “New System” inaugurated by the Welshman Edward Williams, principal of the Rotherham Academy and popularized by his pupil, John Roberts (1767-1834) of Llanbryn-mair, became “the doctrinal springboard of the Welsh radicalism of the nineteenth century” (Davies 45). The activist tenor of the age including the successes of the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society and the proliferation of catechizing meetings and all age Sunday schools, taught Welsh Nonconformists to think for themselves, to take matters into their own hands, and soon to challenge the socio-political status quo. Led by the Independents David Rees (1801-69) and William Rees (“Gwilym Hiraethog”) (1803-83), Baptists like Thomas Thomas (1805-81) of Pontypool and Thomas Price (1820-88) of Aberdare, and taken up increasingly by the previously quiescent Calvinistic Methodists, by mid-century popular Nonconformity was becoming a potent political force of the Whig persuasion, set to challenge the Church of England-Tory hegemony in Wales: “In creating an articulate, literate and self-confident people, Nonconformity was preparing the way for a great political revolution” (R. Tudur Jones 159). Now that so many of Wales’s worshippers were outside the pale of the Established Church, the scene had been set for the creation of what seemed to be a whole nation imbued with the values of Protestant Dissent.
“It may be stated in general terms,” wrote Henry Richard, soon to be elected as Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil, “that the Welsh are now a nation of Nonconformists” (Richard 2). With the triumph of Nonconformity came the flexing of political muscle and a move to meet the challenge of late-Victorian modernity. The granting of the vote to working class males in 1868 changed the political complexion of the nation. The division became stark: a small anglicized gentry whose allegiance was to the Church of England and a large working and agricultural class now possessing growing parliamentary representation, which was Welsh in speech and Nonconformist in religion. The Chapel-Church divide would characterize Wales well into the twentieth century. Soon most longstanding Dissenting grievances would be allayed: the tithe would be commuted, church rates would be abolished, burial and marriage laws were amended to allow Nonconformists full and binding rights, while the two ancient English universities were opened up to (male) Dissenting undergraduates. The one burning cause to remain was that of disestablishment. As it happened the Church of England would be disestablished and disendowed within the four Welsh dioceses by 1914, but the protracted and bitter campaign both for and against disestablishment did more harm to the reputation of institutional Christianity than good (Morgan 2011b 30-37). By the end of the Victorian era more and more people were being disengaged from specifically religious questions and drawn to matters of temporal improvement and change.
Links to Related Material about Protestant Nonconformity in Victorian Wales
Bibilography
Bassett, T. M. The Welsh Baptists. Swansea: Ilston Press, 1977.
Carwardine, Richard. "The Welsh Evangelical Community and 'Finney’s Revival.’" The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29 (1978): 463-80.
Davies, Pennar. Episodes in the History of Brecknockshire Dissent. Brecon: the Brecknockshire Society, 1959.
Doe, Norman, Ed. A New History of the Church in Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Griffith, W. P. “'Preaching second to no other under the sun:' Edward Matthews, the Nonconformist pulpit and Welsh identity during the mid-nineteenth century," in Religion and National Identity: Wales and Scotland, c. 1700-2000. Ed. Robert Pope. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001. 61-83.
Griffiths, Rhidian. "Songs of Praises," in The History of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism, III: Growth and Consolidation (c. 1814-1914). Ed. J. Gwynfor Jones. Cardiff: Presbyterian Church of Wales, 2013. 139-49.
Jenkins, Geraint H. The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1660-1780. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Jones, David Ceri, Boyd S. Schlenther and Eryn M. White. The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012.
Jones, Ieuan Gwynedd and David Williams, Eds. The Religious Census of 1851: A Calendar of the Returns relating to Wales, Vol. 1: South Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976.
Jones, R. Tudur. Congregationalism in Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004.
Lionel Madden, Ed. Methodism in Wales: A Short History of the Wesley Tradition. Llandudno: Welsh Methodist Conference, 2003.
Morgan, D. Densil. "'Smoke, fire and light”: Baptists and the revitalization of Welsh Dissent," The Baptist Quarterly 32 (1988): 224-32.
Morgan, D. Densil. "Christmas Evans and the birth of Nonconformist Wales," in Wales and the World: Historical Perspectives on Welsh Religion and Identity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. 17-30.
Morgan, D. Densil. ‘Thomas Jones of Denbigh (1756-1820) and the ordination of 1811’, The Welsh Journal of Religious History 6 (2011): 19-30.
Morgan, D. Densil. The Span of the Cross: Christian Religion and Society in Wales, 1914-2000. 2nd ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011.
Morgan, D. Densil. Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Vol 2: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1760-1900. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021.
Henry Richard, Letters and Essays on Wales (1866). 2nd ed. London: James Clarke, 1884.
Gomer M. Roberts, Ed. Hanes Methodistiaeth Galfinaidd Cymru (‘A History of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism’). Vol. 2. Caernarfon: Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1978.
Tudur, Geraint. Howell Harris: From Conversion to Separation, 1735-50. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998.
White, Eryn M. "'I will once more shake the heavens:' The 1762 Revival in Wales," in Revival and Resurgence in Christian History. Eds. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008. 154-63.
Glanmor Williams, "Fire on Cambria’s Altar," in The Welsh and their Religion: Historical Essays. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991. 1-72.
Last modified 20 August 2022