Welsh Journals

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Wales, the Princeton Theology and a Nineteenth Century Battle for the Bible' D. Densil Morgan Very little has been written of the impact of Welsh Nonconformist religion on the United States and even less on the way in which American theology affected Christianity in Wales. Yet one of the most obvious characteristics of nineteenth-century Wales was the prevalence and growth of Protestant evangelicalism during a time when more and more of its inhabitants were leaving its shores to make a new life in what many of them still called 'the new world'.2 By 1840 Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists of both Calvinistic and Wesleyan hues had arrived in America in their thousands replicating the social and religious patterns of the localities which they had left behind. If earlier generations attracted by William Penn's promise of freedom from religious oppression had blended into the amalgam of eighteenth-century Philadelphia,3 nineteenth-century immigrants arrived in sufficient numbers to form vibrant communities in New York State, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Here the Welsh language would remain the principal means of communication for two generations or more during which Nonconformist culture reigned supreme.4 If this culture sabbatarian, revivalistic, Word-centred and temperance based had much in common with the popular evangelicalism of American Protestantism, its particularity was bolstered by worship as well as literary and cultural activities through the medium of Welsh, while its strength was constantly replenished by the influx of fresh newcomers from home. Although much work on the subject has been done, though fairly sporadically, down the years,5 a thorough, systematic and definitive study of the patterns of Welsh immigration and the way in which they would be affected by American realities is still needed. There is no doubt that religious considerations would loom large in such a work. The aim of this paper is much more partial and modest. It is to afford a glimpse at the way in which some Welsh and Welsh-American theologians responded to the critical and, for some, disturbing changes that were influencing religious thought during the Victorian era. As the Bible was central to Nonconformist faith, the controversy surrounding questions of the inspiration, authority and infallibility of Holy Scripture were of particular importance at the time.