On another occasion, he met a young minister at Llantrissant, and, after a meeting in the morning, he inquired of the young man what he was then reading; the reply was, that he was going slowly through Beattie on Truth a second time. Christmas Evans immediately replied, “You must come to see me before you return to Swansea, and give me the substance of Beattie: was he not the man that replied to David Hume, eh?” The young man said he had the book in his pocket, and that he would cheerfully give it him, but the print was very small. He, with still greater eagerness, said, “I can manage that. I will take of it, with many thanks.” It was a pleasure to give it him, and he pocketed it with as much pleasure as ever a school-boy did the first prize, at the end of the session. In three days after, the young man called upon him, at his own house, and spent a couple of hours with him; but he says he could get no farther, in conversation, than upon Beattie,—he was thoroughly absorbed in the argument with Hume, and his school of scepticism, and unbelief. Yet he was now sixty-five years of age; his one eye was very weak, though seeing well enough, without a glass, at the proper distance; and he was, otherwise, full of bodily infirmities; but his love of reading was unabated, as was, also, his earnest curiosity to know what was passing on in the world of thought.
And among his friends, at this period, we notice some members of the Edwards family,—David Edwards, of Beaupre, or, as it is commonly pronounced, Bewper, in Glamorganshire; and Evan Edwards, of Caerphilly, the son, and grandson of one of the most remarkable men modern Wales has produced, William Edwards, in his day a mighty engineer. Until his time, the Rialto, in Venice, was esteemed the largest arch in Europe, but he threw an arch over the Taff forty-two feet wider, and thus, for a long time, it held its reputation of being the largest arch in the world. A wonderful man was William Edwards, entirely self-made, not only a great engineer, but a successful farmer, and an ordained Independent minister. He was wealthy, of course, but he insisted upon receiving a good income from his church, although he distributed every farthing among the poor of his own neighbourhood, and added, considerably, to the sum he distributed, from his own property. The successor to Mr. Edwards, as the pastor of the Independent Church of Y-Groeswen, was the Rev. Griffith Hughes, a person of about the same age as Christmas Evans, also, although a polished gentleman, a self-taught man, a wit, a man of considerable reading, and information, and widely advanced in his religious opinions; although, professedly, a Calvinist, beyond the narrow, and technical Calvinism of his time, and even beyond the Fullerism, or doctrines of Andrew Fuller, which had been charged on Christmas Evans, as a crime, by his enemies in Anglesea.