Welsh Journals

wider setting than is customary with Welsh historians'. The result seems to illustrate the difficulty of serving two masters with equal success. To an English reader unfamiliar with Wales, Harris may well seem something of a disembodied spirit, and some short biographical sketch, together with some description of the state of religion in the Principality, would have been helpful. For such a reader, too much is often assumed by such statements as 'The manner in which Howel Harris was won for Christ is well known', though for Welsh readers the information would no doubt be superfluous. Mr. Nuttall treats his subject under three headings: I The Portrait of an Enthusiast; II The Wider Scene; III The Significance of Enthusiasm. On each of these topics he has interesting points to make, though again a good deal of background knowledge is taken for granted. He points out at once the individual and the corporate aspects of Harris's religious activities. His conversion was prior to his meeting with the Wesleys and with Whitefield and owed nothing to their influence, and he remained in some ways rather sensitively independent and apart. He was a layman preaching before John Wesley sanctioned his lay preachers, and though, like both Wesleys, he was a devout Anglican, he was more than half- hearted over the business of taking orders and in fact never did so, preferring instead the freedom to go his own ways. His views were in many ways remarkably tolerant in that he found points of agreement with the Moravians, the Wesleys, the Dissenters, the Church, Whitefield, and the Quakers (p. 41). Nevertheless, there was much that he shared with the other leaders of the religious revival and this ecumenical aspect of their work is well brought out in the chapter on The Wider Scene. In spite of a tendency to break up into splinter groups, which was perhaps all but inevitable when so many strong characters felt too deeply on the fundamentals of the Christian life, what was happening in New England, in Ireland, and in Scotland, as well as in Wales and England, was a matter of burning concern and the links both personal and written were constant and intimate among those who shared it. Harris was, in some ways, more like Whitefield than Wesley. To some extent this was a matter of social background. The Wesleys were gentlemen born; Harris and Whitefield, if one may adapt a phrase, were not self-made so much as religion-made men. Wesley's method of preaching was one of simplicity, Whitefield's oratory was famous, almost notorious, and Harris obviously got tremendous stimulation when he preached with power. Wesley could take the Countess of Huntingdon in his stride; when Harris was about to be introduced to her he wrote, 'on hearing I am going to see a Lady, I was inflamed with praise to God', though later he was to show himself capable of being critical of her. In dealing with the problem of 'enthusiasm' in his last chapter, Mr. Nuttall provides a sympathetic explanation of both its raison d'etre in the eighteenth century and its methods of manifestation. In some ways this