Welsh Journals

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A Short, Plain Help for Parents and Heads of Families, to Feed their Babes with the Sincere Milk of God's Word, by David Evans, edited, with an Introduction by Boyd Stanley Schlenther. (Aberystwyth The National Library of Wales, 1993). viii + 60pp + facsimile, ISBN 0 907158 60 9, n.p. David Evans's catechism was first published in Philadelphia in 1732, but no copy has survived, and although there was a second printing in 1740, the only known surviving copy is in such poor condition that no scholar has been allowed to consult it. The Franklin Institute has now, with funding from the British Academy, restored that unique copy, and a photographic version is here reproduced in its original size, together with a typeset version and an introduction by Boyd Schlenther, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wales. It is apparently 'the only surviving catechism produced by a Presbyterian throughout the entire colonial American period'. David Evans was a Carmarthenshire shepherd who emigrated to Pennsylvania in about 1704 in the hope of earning enough money to 'buy plenty of books'. He worked as a carpenter among a small group of Welsh co-religionists in Tredyffryn, and began to conduct services of worship. This came to the attention of the first American Presbyterian presbytery, and he became its first candidate for the ministry, being ordained in 1714 after spending a year at the embryonic university of Yale in Connecticut. He thereafter ministered at Pencader (now Glasgow, Delaware), at Tredyffryn, and finally among an English community at Pilesgrove, New Jersey. In addition to the catechism, Evans published two volumes of sermons, and left an autobiographical poem composed in Welsh. He died in 1751. Evans belongs, therefore, in the tradition of eighteenth century col- onial Calvinism, resting as it did on the basic British Reformed doc- trinal formulations of the Westminster Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Although Evans objected to their use as tests of ministerial orthodoxy, and temporarily withdrew from the American synod's jurisdiction on that issue, his catechism proclaimed