Welsh Journals

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THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK IN WALES. UNTIL rather recent times it has been true to say that the life of Wales has been but little affected by contact with the great world beyond our own borders. Hitherto our language has served as a mighty bulwark to keep out both the good and the evil that the alien might wish to send to us. Fierce currents of thought and of action might be swirling without, but Offa's Dyke was a sufficient guard against their entry into Wales. It is true that the mightiest forces in our life came to us from afar, from Galilee and from Geneva, but it is no less true that hardly a nation of equal culture has depended so completely for support on its native tradition. Gerald de Barri might be much at home in Paris or in Rome; Hiraethog might try to make us feel the spell of the mighty spirit that dwelt in Luther and in Kossuth and Dr. Lewis Edwards might translate and interpret the works of Homer and of Kant for the good of his monoglot countrymen yet for all that, it remained true that the nation as a whole, had but a small share in the infinitely rich life of the great world with its long story. But the middle-wall of partition between us and the wide world has at length been completely broken down, and so for better and for worse the life of our people must henceforth be continuous with that of the whole civilized world. If we live by faith we shall say that the gain in life is sure to be immense, for our hearts will be set on right things, and the store of them will be greater for us than ever before. Our enormously enlarged contact with the world is chiefly owing to education and to industrial development. Our County Schools and our University have been busy training a new generation of Welshmen to be wise, to appreciate the worth of our national heritage, and also to appropriate that accumulated wealth of truth and beauty, which has come down to us from all lands and all ages, and which it is a main function of a University to hold in faithful trust, and to hand down, with added worth, to each generation as it passes through its gates to meet the stern challenges of life. Greece and Rome, no less than France and Germany, bring their tribute to the youth of Wales, who in this day of grace are the heirs of all the ages. Contact with the modern world through its literature is completed by the ever-increasing facilities of travel. No- thing human can henceforth be alien to us. And then again our growing industrial life has brought us into close contact with the whole Western world, where the same type of life prevails. Throughout the great labour world there is a singular solidarity. In industrial Wales every form of human speech is heard to-day and every type of thought expressed. For the future our problems and our tasks in Wales must, in the main, be the same in essence as those which confront the whole Western world. Our peculiar national tradition may give these interests a local idiom, but the Trade Union and the Public Press have empire over us as over the rest of the modern world. Now, how does all this affect the reli- gious situation in Wales ? To begin with it may be remarked that the levelling influence of the University has been felt in the department of Theology