ident less tragic.
Accustomed to drink himself to inebriety at a public-house--a socially
winked-at indulgence then--he one day took his pet goat with him, and
poured liquor down the creature's throat. The refusal of the poor goat
to go there again forced the reckless priest to reflect on his own ways.
He forsook the ale-house and became a changed man.

Among his writings--later than this--is found the following plain, blunt
statement of what continued long to be true of Welsh society, as
represented in the common use of Sunday time.

Of all the days throughout the rolling year
There's not a day we pass so much amiss,
There's not a day wherein we all appear
So irreligious, so profaned as this.

A day for drunkenness, a day for sport,
A day to dance, a day to lounge away,
A day for riot and excess, too short
Amongst the Welshmen is the Sabbath day.

A day to sit, a day to chat and spend,
A day when fighting 'mongst us most prevails,
A day to do the errands of the Fiend--
Such is the Sabbath in most parts of Wales.

Meantime some who could read the language--and the better educated (like
the author of the above rhymes) knew English as well as Welsh--had seen
a rescued copy of _Wycliffs New Testament_, a precious publication
seized and burnt (like the bones of its translator) by hostile
ecclesiastics, and suppressed for nearly two hundred years. Walter Bute,
like Obadiah who hid the hundred prophets, may well be credited with
such secret salvage out of the general destruction. And there were
doubtless others equally alert for the same quiet service. We can
imagine how far the stealthy taste of that priceless book would help to
strengthen a better religion than the one doled out professionally to
the multitude by a Civil church; and how it kept the hallelujah alive
in silent but constant souls; and in how many cases it awoke a
conscience long hypnotized under corrupt custom, and showed a renegade
Christian how morally untuned he was.

Daylight came slowly after the morning star, but when the dawn reddened
it was in welcome to Pritchard's and Penry's gospel song; and sunrise
hastened at the call of Caradoc, and Powell, and Erbury, and Maurice,
the holy men who followed them, some with the trumpet of Sinai and some
with the harp of Calvary.

Cambria was being prepared for its first great revival of religion.

There was no rich portfolio of Christian hymns such as exi