With all these singular observances and superstitions, there was yet a kind of Christian faith prevalent among the people, but buried beneath dark ignorance and social folly. At Christmas time, at night, it was usual to illuminate all the churches in the villages. And upon the New Year’s morning, children came waking the dawning, knocking at the doors,—usually obtaining admittance,—when they proceeded to sprinkle the furniture with water, singing as they did so the following words, which we quote on account of their quaint, sweet, old-world simplicity:—
“Here we bring new water from the well so clear, For to worship God with this happy new year. Sing levy dew, sing levy dew, the water and the wine, With seven bright gold wires and bugles that do shine. Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her toe, Open you the west door, and turn the old year go. Sing reign of fair maid, with gold upon her chin, Open you the east door, and let the new year in.”
It is admitted on all hands that the dissolution of the mists of darkness and superstition is owing to the people usually called Dissenters; the Church of the Establishment—and this is said in no spirit of unkindness—did very little to humanise or soften the rugged character, or to put to flight the debasing habits of the people. Of course, there are high and honourable exceptions; but while many clergymen devoted themselves, with great enthusiasm, to the perpetuation of the singular lore, the wild bardic songs, the triads, or the strange fables and mythic histories of the country, we can call to mind the names of but very few who attempted to improve, or to ameliorate, the social condition. So that the preachers, and the vast gatherings of the people by whom the preachers were surrounded, when the rays of knowledge were shed abroad, and devotion fired, were not so much the result of any antagonism to the Established Church,—_that_ came afterwards; they were a necessity created by the painful exigencies of the country.
The remarks on the superstitions of Wales are not at all irrelevant to the more general observations on Welsh preaching; they are so essentially inwoven with the type of character, and nationality. The Welsh appears to be intimately related to the Breton; the languages assimilate,—so also do the folk-lores of the people; and the traditions and fanciful fables which have been woven from the grasses of the field, the leaves of the forest, and the clouds of the heavens, would have furnished Christmas Evans with allegoric texts which he might have expanded into sermons. It is not possible to doubt that these form one branch, from the great Celtic stem, of the human family. And not only are they alike in language and tradition, but also in the melancholy religiousness, in the metaphysical brooding over natural causes, and in the absence of any genuine humour, except in some grim or gloomy and grotesque utterance. The stories, the heroes, and the heroines, are very much the same; historic memory in both looks back to a fantastic fairyland, and presents those fantastic pictures of cities and castles strangely submerged beneath the sea, and romantic shadows and spectral forms of wonderful kings and queens, such as we meet in the Mabinogi of Taliesin, in the Fairy Queen of Spenser, and in the Idylls of our Laureate. Thus, all that could stir wonder, excite the imagination and the fancy, and describe the nearness of the supernatural to the natural, would become very charming to a Welshman’s ears; and we instantly have suggested to us one of the sources of the power and popularity of Christmas Evans with his countrymen.