Decidedly the Welsh of that day seemed to think that it was essential to the preservation of the purity of the Gospel that their ministers should be kept low. Mr. D. M. Evans, in his Life of Christmas Evans, gives us the anecdote of a worthy and popular minister of this time, who was in the receipt of exactly twenty pounds a year; he received an invitation from another Church, offering him three pounds ten a month. This miserable lover of filthy lucre, like another Demas, was tempted by the dazzling offer, and intimated his serious intention of accepting “the call.” There was a great commotion in the neighbourhood, where the poor man was exceedingly beloved; many of his people remonstrated with him on the sad exhibition he was giving of a guilty love of money; and, after much consideration, the leading deacon was appointed as a deputation to wait upon him, and to inform him, that rather than suffer the loss of his removal on account of money considerations, they had agreed to advance his salary to twenty guineas, or twenty-one pounds! Overcome by such an expression of his people’s attachment, says Mr. Evans, he repented of his incontinent love of money, and stayed.
A strange part-glimpse all this seems to give of Welsh clerical life, not calculated either to kindle, or to keep in a minister’s mind, the essential sense of self-respect. The brothers of La Trappe, St. Francis and his preaching friars, do not seem to us a more humiliated tribe than Christmas and his itinerating “little _brethren_ of the poor.” We suppose that sometimes a farmer would send a cheese, and another a few pounds of butter, and another a flitch of bacon; and, perhaps, occasionally, in the course of his travels,—we do not know of any such instances, we only suppose it possible, and probable,—some rich man, after an eloquent sermon, would graciously patronize the illustrious preacher, by pressing a real golden sovereign into the apostle’s hand.
One wonders how clothes were provided. William Huntingdon’s “Bank of Faith” seems to us, in comparison with that of Christmas Evans, like the faith of a man who wakes every morning to the sense of the possession of a million sterling at his banker’s,—in comparison with _his_ faith, who rises sensible that, from day to day, he has to live as on the assurance, and confidence of a child.
