Welsh Journals

UP to about 1880 at any rate, typical Welsh life as a whole was still mid-Victorian, if not early Victorian, in its main features. The movements which in the meantime have created the Wales of today were still waiting to be born. There has been an almost inconceivable change in the outlook and in-look of our people. Those of us who are now little more than fifty years of age have themselves seen the birth and growth of all those movements which are seriously moulding our national life today. I am not thinking now of such things as the war and wire- less and motor cars but of more internal influ- ences such as the revival of national sentiment and conviction on new lines, the intellectual and prac- tical struggle for the recognition and preservation of the national language, the creation and organ- isation of our whole educational system, the rise of effective Trade Unionism, the Labour IParty, Socialism and Communism, the spread of modern and modernist thought and criticism, with all their constructive and devastating results in every dir- ection. One fails to remember any country where such a radical change of outlook has been brought about with such sudden rapidity without a violent revolution. These influences have naturally been more up- setting in the realms of religion, theology and the churches than in any other-as indeed was to be expected in a country where practically all the traditional interests of the people were in their chapel and its activities. I myself can remember the time before the English tide set in to cast our churches into end- less confusion and almost inextricable difficulties; when practically every member of the congrega- tion was a Liberal of some kind, before the Labour Party and Socialism began to worry ministers and deacons to death; when almost every man, woman, and child stood on practically the same level of culture and education, before the boys and girls of the County Schools arose to exas- perate their parents almost beyond endurance with their strange new questions, and before the young men and women of the University came back home and to their churches with ideas that seemed absolutely impious to the older generation and when, with exceedingly few cranky exceptions, everybody in the churches was 'of the same opin- ion still' in matters theological and religious, ex- cept for the exciting luxury of disagreeing violently on state occasions with regard to such decorative subjects as baptism. It is difficult to realize that those were the happy days of only forty or fifty years ago. The Great War has only hastened the growth of some of these processes RELIGION by J. Morgan Jones and delayed a little the spread of others, while the Revival at the beginning of the century scarcely counts in the general march of Welsh life as a whole through its economic, literary, political, in- tellectual, moral and spiritual revolutions. The most surprising thing is not that the churches have lost their centrality in the national life and suffered a good deal in the stress of the struggle, but that there are still so many vigor- ous religious organisations struggling valiantly to keep the flag of organised Christianity flying. So far indeed as ecclesiastical or denominational loyalties externally are concerned, and so far as we lay any stress on nominal membership and on the habit of regular twice-a-Sunday church-going, the churches are inevitably fighting a losing battle. There has already been created a large body of people-a class new and strange to Wales-a large body of respectable and respected people, seriously and even religiously inclined, who only occasionally and on impulse enter our churches and chapels and who sit very loosely to all ex- ternal religious observances. I am not sure that it will ever be possible under any circumstances to bring back the old state of affairs when it was considered to be nothing less than a sin and a dis- grace not to be in your place in church or chapel morning and evening. It seems to us now to sug- gest rather a caricature of godliness and a cam- ouflage of reverence which never could represent permanent reality. It may be that in order to regain something of their former prestige in the life of the community, the churches will have to content themselves with being less imposing in their ecclesiastical pretensions, less jealous of other religious influences, and less anxious to make a good show in membership and external author- ity. It may be that they must become smaller ex- ternally in order to become higher in moral and spiritual influence. In any case, I am not pre- pared to grant that the new generation in Wales is less really religious in thought and feeling and practice than the old generation of fifty years ago. In my opinion, its religion is on the whole a better and a more real one. There are more genuinely Christian elements in it, both inside and outside the churches. Though it is largely the religion of revolt, there is a deeper Christian instinct in it than in the old barren controversies. We have now a far better Christian ministry than ever and better preaching-at least a far more Christian type of preaching. I think myself that our ministry still runs far too much into the formal, stereotyped channels of preaching, and that its forms must become much more varied and elastic. Our re- ligion and our ministry may not lay much stress