Welsh Journals

aspirations. It can find that in one place only, in a Catholicism which is both Catholic and Celtic and, just at present, that is not very apparent in the Church in Wales. The Church in Wales is in a peculiarly difficult position at the present moment and the lines along which it is to develop have to be determined in the coming years. Time is fleeting: and the opportunity is fleeting with it. I have referred already to the influx into the land of a large stranger element, which we have to absorb. The greater portion of that element, in so far as it adheres to any religious body at all, adheres to the Church in Wales. The majority of the adherents of the Church are strangers to Wales and Welsh culture. We want to imbue them with an understanding of both. The clergy is preponderatingly Welsh, and in the great majority of cases devotedly so. I think I am not far wrong in saying that 90 per cent. of the clergy are Welsh, and very largely Welsh-speaking. The Church in Wales has two duties to per- form, to administer to the people for whom and by whom it was built up, and at the same time to administer to all people, of whatsoever nationality they belong to, who dwell in the land. If she fails in either, she fails to be a Celtic Catholic Church. Naturally she must be swayed and guided to some extent by the majority of people who claim her ministrations. If Welsh people hold aloof from her, is the Church to be blamed, if she appears to be less Welsh than she should be? If you surrender that which is yours, who is to blame ? Strangers in Wales are willing enough, with exceptions, to accept the Church in Wales as their spiritual guide. Cannot Welsh people do the same? The Church is theirs, created by their predecessors for them, and if Welsh people will but adhere to it, that Church will remain Welsh for all time. It is independent of all external control its fate and its utility lie entirely in the hands of Welshmen, if they will but join it in a full national and Catholic spirit. In it they will find, what they will not find else- where, a common platform with the stranger within our gates, a common meeting-ground wherein we can both work, side by side, coalescing as times go on into one, to the honour and service of Wales and the Church, which is co-aeval with it That is the first constructive suggestion I have to make to the young men and women of Wales -a free and full acceptance of the Church, the Celtic Catholic Church, as the interpretating medium of their religious aspirations, to which interpretation their own experience can and will contribute. It was created for that work there is nowhere else where the linking of the past with the present, and the present with the future can be achieved as it can in the Church. There is nowhere else where the coalition of apparent competing forces for the control of Wales' future can be effected. The Church has been diverted, far too often, from her original purpose. She is now free free to serve Wales and the Welsh people, free to act as the coalescing medium of Welsh and stranger into one. The shadow of Canterbury is no longer over us. If there be any who think the Church to-day might be more fully Welsh than she is, the remedy is in the hands of the Welsh people themselves. The Church calls them back to her. They have no right to blame her for any shortcomings, if they reject the appeal. To accept it means submission, from within and without. Submis- sion is the most difficult lesson there is for us to learn, but it can be learnt if we have the will to learn and it is in submission, submission of the dignitaries of the Church, submission of the people of Wales, submission, too, of the new comers into Wales to the purpose of the Church, that the highest service to Wales lies. The dignitaries of the Church can take many steps to remove whatever difficulties there may be to acceptance. To sketch those steps in detail requires a fuller equipment than I can lay claim to but may I suggest just one, a simple thing to do, namely, the institution by the Church of a prayer in its morning and evening service, a prayer for Wales, and the Welsh people, and for the stranger within our gates, that in and through the Celtic Catholic Church they may become one, imbued with a sense of common fellowship, which is Catholic, and with a desire to render service, through that fellowship, to all who dwell in the land of Wales, which is Celtic. For Wales, Celtic Catholicism is Christianity. The stranger within our gates can do much also. He can abandon that attitude, far too common-I could give instance after instance of it within my own knowledg-e-of hostility to the use of Welsh in the Church's services, and in the proceedings of the controlling councils. He can remember that Catholicism is greater than Anglicanism. But it is the people of Wales that can do most by adhering in this crisis of our religious history to their historic Church, blam- ing her not for past or present errors, but loving her as she should be loved, and giving her the service she needs. The union will come, not in our days nor by any violent step. Those of my generation pro- bably would yield little to achieve it. It will come by the growth of a spirit in the voung men and women of Wales demanding that it shall come. Time is infinitely long but it is in the certainty that the evil effects of the Canterbury domination will be forgotten and forgiven, that the terrible passions of the last century will be buried in oblivion, and that Wales, native and stranger, will unite in one Celtic Catholic Church that it is possible to believe that Wales will never die. If we have not that faith, slowly but surely. Wales will sink into a denial of the very foundations of the Christian religion, and Wales, as an entity, will become a thing of the past.