will call him the "Seraphic
John Elias."

His name was John Jones when he was admitted a member of the presbytery.
What followed is a commentary on the embarrassing frequency of a common
name, nowhere realized so universally as it is in Wales.

"What is his father's name?" asked the moderator when John Jones was
announced.

"Elias Jones," was the answer.

"Then call the young man John Elias," said the speaker, "otherwise we
shall by and by have nobody but John Joneses."

And "John Elias" it remained.]

An accession of temperance hymns in Wales followed the spread of the
"Washingtonian" movement on the other side of the Atlantic in 1840, and
began a moral reformation in the county of Merioneth that resulted in a
spiritual one, and added to the churches several thousand converts,
scarcely any of whom fell away.

The revival of 1851-2 was a local one, but was believed by many to have
been inspired by a celestial antiphony. The remarkable sounds were
either a miracle or a psychic wonder born of the intense imagination of
a sensitive race. A few pious people in a small village of
Montgomeryshire had been making special prayer for an outpouring of the
spirit, but after a week of meetings with no sign of the result hoped
for, they were returning to their homes, discouraged, when they heard
strains of sweet music in the sky. They stopped in amazement, but the
beautiful singing went on--voices as of a choir invisible, indistinct
but melodious, in the air far above the roof of the chapel they had just
left. Next day, when the astonished worshippers told the story, numbers
in the district said they had heard the same sounds. Some had gone out
at eleven o'clock to listen, and thought that angels must be singing.
Whatever the music meant, the good brethren's and sisters' little
meetings became crowded very soon after, and the longed-for out-pouring
came mightily upon the neighborhood. Hundreds from all parts flocked to
the churches, all ages joining in the prayers and hymns and testimonies,
and a harvest of glad believers followed a series of meetings "led by
the Holy Ghost."

The sounds in the sky were never explained; but the belief that God sent
His angels to sing an answer to the anxious prayers of those pious
brethren and sisters did no one any harm.

Whether this event in Montgomeryshire was a preparation for what took
place six or seven years later is a suggestive question only, but when
the wave of spiritual powe