To-night we have joined in a s vice of song: lifting our hearts and voices in thankful praise to the Almighty God. Praising Him in glorious melody. That melody has come to us from the land of which we have been thinking. Welsh hymns possess a beauty and fervour which have their background in the spirit of the Celtic people. Often accused of unreliability, but really misunderstood by their more stolid and matter of fact neighbours. The Celt has a vision others know not. and sees beauty where blind, and seeing what mot, clothes all with the garments of romance, dramatizing everything.
One has said that the Welsh sing for the joy of singing: that they express themselves more readily in song than any other way. Whether that be true or not, Welsh hymn tunes Wonderfully melodious and th ility to sing seems national gift. It is not nece: understand Welsh to know Welsh hymns, with their passionate vitality, must have played a tremendous part in the nonconformist revival.
The Welsh can, and do, sing themselves out of sorrow and depression, as any visitor to the South may tell you.
But my time has gone. 1 close 1 began. It is of mountains vou think when you remember Wales.
Mountains n sunlight—mountains in the mist of morning. mountains blotted out by rain. ominous in their ery invisibility And shall we not say that the my ud poetic qualities of the Welsh people have been engendered and developed by the changing moods Of the mountains? For no man can live long with high places and not think thoughts of God. y of years gone by turns over esh pages to link up Cressy with Ypres, and Agincourt with Gallipoli Wales claims the longest coritinuous Christian History, in the British Isles. The Welsh mere Christians before the English. Indeed, this we hold against them When the Angles and the Jutes, and later the Saxons, came in Ban and fought the real Britons, driving them slowly West into the mountains, and capturing their country, they hated them too much even to Christianize them. They took with them on their westward flight whatever was left of Roman Christianity and it was left For a fresh influx of Roman fervour to come with, its missionary endeavour to Christianize the now dominant race. It was at this point in history that the child was born who was to become the Patron Saint of Wales. A general concensus of opinion dates his birth between 520 and 530. Some of the older people among whom he grew up would remember watching the Roman legions embark for Italy, after four centuries of Romañ coloization in the British Isles. And remember the dark days that followed. Forty years of horror. Forty years of slaughter and raiding, Forty years of battle and fighting against ihe heathen An es and Saxons from over the sea. Forty terrible years, as the ordered world seemed io fall about them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.