Welsh Journals

THE WELSH WEEKLY. February 12, i8g2. NOTES FROM THE MIDLAND METROPOLIS. Dueing the laat 30 years the sum of nearly £80,000 has been spent in restoring Lichfield Cathedral, £65,000 of which has been raised by voluntary contributions, but much more work ia yet left to be done. The desire of the Dean and Chapter is that the eight remaining years of the present century should see at least £20,000 plaoed in their bands, so that they may complete the restoration of the fabric. The Committee of the local Eisteddfod which is to be held in Birmingham on Easter Monday are offering a prize for the best Pryddest, not to exceed 200 lines, on " Y Daeargnjn yn Japan" open to all comers. Dr. Cynhafal Jones, of Llanidloes, is the adjudicator; the composition to be in his possession not later than March 30. Secretary : Mr. J. Davies, 61, Murdoch Eoad, Handsworth. MR. W. T. STEAD IN CARDIFF. Complaints were made a few months ago that the students of Handsworth Wesleyan College have not been as ardent for missionary work as some of their friends expected them to be, but their enthusiasm at the Missionary Anniversary, which was held at the College last week, shows that the excellent tradition of the institu¬ tion was fully maintained this year. Sunday, 31st ult., was an important day with Churchmen in Birmingham. Simultaneous sermons were preached in different churches in the city, on behalf of the Church Extension Society. Among the preachers were the Bishops of Worcester, Bedford, Shrewsbury, Peterborough, and Coventry, Canons Knox-Little, Jacob, and Elliott, and several other ecclesiastical dignitaries. The annual public meeting took place in the Town Hall on the following Monday evening. The report and statistics of the Society show that Birmingham was very far behind other large towns and cities in the provision which was made for spiritual destitution. In the north and east of London there was one clergyman to about 3000 of the population ; in Leeds, one for every 2800; in Liverpool, one for every 2595 ; and in Birmingham, only one for every 4800; but that was not all, because those clergymen were not distri¬ buted evenly over all the area of population. They might have a parish with a population of 27,000 with only two clergymen. The Bishop of the diocese said he should never rest satisfied until they had in Birmingham at least one clergymen for every 2000 of the population. At the reopening of Spencer Street Congregational Chapel, Leamington, Dr. Fairbairn, Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, preached, on Thursday last, two powerful sermons from Gal. ii. 20. He read his text from the authorised version, but asked permission to read it thus:— "lam crucifiedjwith Christ, and \I do not live even yet, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I "now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." The chapter was one of the most instructive. It helped them to look straight into the Apostolic Church, and study the Apostolic men just as they lived in the flesh. They knew differences—they differed, for they were men, and in doing that all the more served the cause of Christ. The other Apostles were strongly inclined to keep the Jewish faith. Paul came as a convert, and a convert was a man who did not always find acceptance in the circles of the converted. He was very unlike an apostate. An apostate is a man who changes side3 without changing convictions. A convert is a man who changes sides because he has changed convictions. An apostate is a man who makes up for his want of belief by despising the man he has joined, and aping the man he has forsaken; a convert is a man who only the more loves the man he has forsaken, the more he admires the man he has joined. A convert is a man so commanded of God's holy truth that he dare not desert; but an apostate is a man who thinks God's truth a convenient means of his own advancement, a happy and congenial way of serving his own ends. Paul was a pre¬ eminent convert. They could not understand Christ if they confined themselves to the Judaic period—to the first century of our era. To do so they must take into considera¬ tion all who had lived in Him and through Him since 1 hat period, and by whose agency He was shaping and changing the world. Christ never saved a soul for mere sake of the soul He saved. The man He saved He made a saviour, and the man was no saviour who had not saved men. How and by what agency had Christ saved men, and made them, in turn, saviours of men ? It was by liOVE. CYMKO. (By Our Special Correspondent.) The much-talked-of and the long-looked-for visit of the Editor of the Beview of Reviews to Cardiff is now a thing of the past. On Sunday, the 7th inst., he conducted three meetings in the Hannah Street Con¬ gregational Chapel, which was built during the ministry of its first pastor, the sainted John Davies. In the morning he read, for a second lesson, the last contribution of the late Mr. Spurgeon to the Sword and Trowel. He introduced another novel feature by basing his remarks, which in the ordinary course of things would be a sermon on a given text, on a conversation which he had with Mr. Spurgeon some years ago. _ Among the striking statements made by him was this—" I never see a costermonger going to the Derby but I think of a great many Christian churches. The coster piles his wife, his wife's sister, her brother, an uncle, two or three children and himself into his cart, and sets off from London to do the 20 miles down to Epsom and back. The poor moke has to do all the work. That donkey is a type and image of the Christian minister of most churches. You put him in the shafts and you pile yourselves into your chapel, and the poor minister has got to toil and moil and carry all you people to heaven. I only hope you'll get there, but you don't deserve it, many of you." In the afternoon he held the first of a series of pleasant Sunday afternoons for the people, Mr. Alfred Thomas, M.P., occupying the chair. His address was a plea for the social aspect of the Forward Movement in Christian churches. He believed in the holding of good concerts, in which music of an entertaining character might be given, and during which people might be allowed to smoke. There were those who thought less of the salvation of their neighbours' souls From Sell's Dictionary of the World's Press. than of the condition of their pews and the cushions in them. Why Bhould they not, on Sunday afternoons, discuss such questions as " How to rid the town of shebeens," instead of whether Israelites worshipped one or two golden calves, and whether such worship originated in the worship of Apis in Egypt ? In the evening a crowded congregation was enter¬ tained by a graphic and interesting lecture delivered by Mr. Stead, illustrated with lime-light views, on the Oberammergau Passion Play, representing the suffer¬ ings and crucifixion of Our Lord. At the conclusion of this hard day's work he was interviewed by the representatives of several news¬ papers, in the course of which he declared his belief in gossip as a means of grace; pleaded for the neces¬ sity of the church being made a common home for the people; admitted that the church had been, and is, a pioneer in thejfurtherance of much social work, and concluded by saying that the Roman Catholic Church recognises human life as a whole more than the Protestant. Monday morning was spent by him as Saturday night had already been, in making inquiries concern¬ ing the moral condition of the town. On Saturday night he had a long interview with the Chief Con¬ stable. On Monday morning he visited the gaol and the workhouse. In the afternoon a large number of ministers and others, including many ladies, gathered together in the church parlour of the Roath Road "Wesleyan Chapel, to hold a conference with Mr. Stead on the question of "The Civic Church.'' The meeting was opened with prayer. Then the speaker stood up, a gentleman of medium stature, ordinary in appearance, high forehead, heavy brows, blue eyes and carelessly trimmed hair. His voice and appearance are neither in his favour nor against him. His audience listened to him with rapt attention, not because of any eloquence nor power of thought on his part, as much as for the prominence in which he stands before the public as a successful journalist and agitator. He said many good and striking things, [but many of his statements were exceedingly rash and apparently thoughtless. An impartial hearer would hesitate to say that he succeeded in making his main idea clear, and in impressing it deeply upon the mind. He commenced by saying that it is now full time for the Christian Church, which has been called to do the greatest possible work in the world— the converting of the kingdoms of this world into the kingdom of our God and of His Christ—to use some amount of common sense in its methods. The world has learned much from the Church, but it is now full time for the church to learn from the world. There is a wide field in which the churches can co-operate for the general good, in spite of their sectarian differences and jealousies. The Chief Constable of this town is more like the true Christian Bishop than any cleric in it. The duty of the Christian Church is to save the town from the power of evil. Mr. Stead's main idea was that there ought to be constituted in this and other towns a religious counterpart of the Town Council, consisting of members elected by the several churches of all sects, as their representatives, for the purpose of carrying on the work of Christ. This Council would constitute the Civic Church. In en¬ forcing this idea upon the minds of his hearers, he said that individual churches are powerless against collective evils ; we must have a collective remedy for a collective evil; we have an apparatus for securing a complete remedy for all the material evils of our towns, but none for its moral corruption. He urged that this representative Council should be formed, that there should be a central office for the purpose of receiving all kinds of information concerning the moral condition of the town, and that by this civic religious council pastoral letters should be sent to the churches. Questions were then asked by several members of the audience, and a discussion followed. Among those who took part were Revs. Alfred Tilly, W. G. Winks, P. Neville Andrews, George St. Clair, W. Hobson, George Hargreaves, J. A. Jenkins, B.A., and Mr. Allen Upward, barrister-at-law. In the evening about a thousand people assembled in the Park Hall, under the presidency of Mr. Rees Jones, J.P., to hear Mr. Stead's lecture on " The Right Relations of Church and State." The address was simply a repetition of that given in the afternoon. At the conclusion Mr. Stead made a determined and deliberate attack upon Sir Charles Dilke, during which several of the ministers on the platform walked out, as well as many members of the audience. A gentleman also objected to the language used by the speaker, and the cries of the audience made it clear that there were divers opinions held concerning the attitude of Mr. Stead towards Sir Charles Dilke. ° REVIEWS. Seven Gomer—-This old serial is evidently renewing its youth, like the eagle. Its first number for 1892 is full of interesting and readable matter. Its articles are of more than average merit. The first is on effective preaching ; and as it is by the writer of these notes, it must suffice us to say in regard to it, that it was prepared for a Ministerial Fraternal held recently, and in due course, at Dolywern, and afterwards it was read to the students of Llangollen College by request of the President. It appears in the Seren by special request of the brethren to whom it was first read. The next article is the second instalment of the Rev. T. Lewis Newport's Memoir of the late Rev. James Michael, Ponthir, Monmouthshire. The first instalment, which appeared in the December Seren, consists of Mr. Michael's own account of himself and work—and charming reading it is. Mr. Michael was a typical Puritan Minister of the last generation- pious, devout, full up to the brim of quaint originality ; and these qualities come out most delightfully in his autobiographical remarks. In this second portion of the Memoir, Mr. Lewis adds his own account, neverthe¬ less, interspersing it with much of Mr. Michael's own thoughts in quaintly-expressed letters, and various notes on men and things. Mr. Lewis himself has much of this same old-world quaintness, which makes his accounts of these worthies of the last generation, of whom he has written so much, always very readable. Mr. Lewis is certainly doing inexpressible service to the Baptist denomination by his assiduous labours in resuscitating the lives of these good men. It is a marvel to us how he succeeds, by his plodding re¬ searches, in discovering so many interesting, original documents relating to these dead and gone worthies. Mr. Humphries, Velinvoel, follows with an article in which he very ably and exhaustively, and in our opinion, convincingly discusses the question of the identity of the author of the fourth Gospel with that of the Apocalypse. Next follows an article, by Mr T Frimston, Garn, on " The Church in the Book of 'the Acts.' Here the author, in an interesting manner, and on the inductive method—the proper one, of course—traces the Christian Church in its nature, subjects, ordinances, methods, &c. Next is a short poem on " Those Above " (" Y rhai sydd fry ") The