To this Ancient Church, founded by St. Cybi about A.D. 550, this
Chapel was added in the 60th year of the reign of Queen Victoria,
A.D. 1897.
“Thy throne, O Lord, is for ever and ever.”
Church of St. Cybi.
SERMON
Preached on the Reopening of St. Cybi’s Church, Holyhead,
after Restoration, 1879, by
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY, D.D.,
Dean of Westminster.
“Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit
whence ye are digged.
“Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you.”
Isaiah li. 1, 2.
WE have been reading for several Sundays in church the history of the
Patriarchs. The words of the Prophet which I have taken for my text give
us the key to that history. We all know the value of the graces and
gifts we derive from our families. Who is there that does not recognise
in himself or in those about him what has come to him and them from
father, mother—nay, it may even be grandfather or great-grandfather,
uncle and aunt—or what may be breathed again into him by brother, sister,
cousin. These, if anything in the world, are gifts to us from without.
These, if anything, are gifts from God. What we drink in, as we say,
with our mother’s milk our mother’s tongue, our mother’s faith and
prayers, it may be, our mother’s character; what we have had impressed
upon us of our father’s spirit, of our “fatherland,” of our father’s
blood—the innocent joys, the tragical sorrows of home and
household;—these are the materials out of which our souls and spirits are
fashioned. We may have our own personal character besides, but without
these our characters would not be what they are.
[Picture: View of Harbour from the upper Church-yard, 1822]
Now, what is thus true of the family in respect of individuals, is true
of races of men in respect both of nations and individuals; and this is
one lesson which those early chapters in the Book of Genesis impress upon
us. They tell us of the family. But, over and above this, they tell us
of the race; they tell us of the immense importance to the Israelites,
and through them to us, of the fact that they sprang from no ignoble or
commonplace nation, but from those whom God had specially selected for
His work on earth—from the tribe of Jacob, from the seed of Abraham, from
the race of Shem. This is the true “predestination” of God’s counsels;
this is the true “election” of the chosen vessels. Race and nationality,
as well as family, are the precious gifts of God, to be used and
recognised and taken account of as amongst the mighty moving powers of
the world. If we wish to see what work we or others are called to do, we
must not forget to look back to the ancient rock from whence we are hewn,
and the deep pit from whence we are digged.
There is also the lesson which all such inquiries bring before us, and
which is specially impressed upon us by these early records of the
Bible—the advantage of being transported to remote ages and scenes wholly
unlike our own. In those stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob there is a
freshness as of the dew of the womb of the morning. We feel younger as
we read; they refresh us in the weary pilgrimage of life; we catch the
early fragrance of the first dawn of the human race. There had been many
great epochs and many great men in Israel since the time of Abraham and
Sarah: there had been Jacob, or Israel, from whom they derived their name
and some of the chief elements of their character; there had been Moses,
under whom they had won their freedom and their laws, and Joshua, by
whose prowess they had conquered the Promised Land, and David, with all
the line of kings and prophets that followed. But still there was a
charm about their first ancestor, Abraham, and their first mother, Sarah,
which they could find in no later times. There was a delight in seeing
the peculiar blessings which they had gained from those old primitive
patriarchs, and for which they were to be ever thankful to God, through
whom these and all other gifts had come.
I. May I take up the Prophet’s words and the lessons of the Book of
Genesis, and give them a special application which this day suggests. We
are met to celebrate the reopening of one of the most ancient churches of
the Welsh people. Most of the building has stood for five hundred
years—one aged arch, we are told, for a thousand years. {27} Let us
then, Englishmen or Welshmen, who are assembled here, ask, in no spirit
of boastfulness or rivalry, but of thankfulness to God, what are the
special gifts for good which the British Celtic race has contributed to
our common country? As the Israelites had for their ancestors Abraham
and Sarah, before their own special patriarch Israel or Jacob—ancestors
by whom they were connected with other races besides their own, Edomite,
Arabian, Mesopotamian—so we were Britons before we were Englishmen; and
we by that Celtic parentage are made one in blood with that old original
people which is parent alike to the Welsh, the Irish, the Scottish, and
the French nations.
What, then, are the best peculiarities of the Welsh people?
(1) To the ancient Cambrian British race we owe that distant atmosphere
of romance, of sentiment, of poetry, which neither Saxon nor Norman have
given or could have given us.
These mountains and vales and creeks and bays, the refuge of the ancient
inhabitants retreating before the invader, have retained, even in their
very names and forms, a poetic inspiration which has elsewhere passed
away.
The four Welsh dioceses each of them speak of this poetic, mystic past.
That marvellous cathedral of St. David’s, in its secluded basin at the
very extremity of the land, shut out from the world and enclosed as
within a natural sanctuary, with its craggy coast and headland and island
and glistening shore and purple cliff, every spring and bay and inlet
teeming with some strange legend of those primitive days of David and Nun
and Lily; or, again, that lovely cathedral of St. Teilo, on the banks of
the Taff, in its green vale, with its crystal stream and its solemn yews;
or, again, that lesser cathedral of St. Asaph, founded by the most
romantic of all the saints of the Celtic race of the north—the darling
Mungo of the Scottish nation—founded as he wandered to and from his own
Glasgow on the Clyde; or, again, this diocese in which we are now
assembled, with Snowdon as the guardian mount that stands round about its
small Jerusalem, this ancient refuge of the Druids and Bards of old from
the Roman conqueror, this Holy Mount of the Holy Island of Mona,
stretching out its arms to the neighbouring shore of Ireland, another
Isle of Saints:—Look at all these ancient sanctuaries, east and west,
north and south. Look at the rock from which we were hewn and the deep
pit from which we were digged. Despise not these feelings which God by a
thousand marks has stamped with His own peculiar approval. Cherish these
venerable ruins and monuments of early times.
There is a legend which tells us that if we take a clod of turf from St.
David’s churchyard, and stand upon it by the shore of that western sea,
we shall see rising in the distant waters the green islands of the
fairies, the vision of a land, not indeed of heaven, but still not of
this earth. It is by taking our stand on that old British soil that we
can catch for ourselves a glimpse of a higher, more romantic, ideal world
than any other part of English history can show. The Bards, indeed,
themselves have perished—
Cold is Cadwallo’s tongue
That hush’d the stormy main;
Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed;
Mountains, ye mourn in vain
Modred, whose magic song
Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topt head.
But the world which they created still lives in that marvellous cycle of
legends which gather round the name of King Arthur, and which, in our own
day, has given to the first of our living poets the worthiest subject
which our island could furnish—the career of the stainless king and his
gallant knights, which our children and our children’s children will read
with their souls more and more raised to nobler and higher thoughts. The
rocks and seas on which we look from Holyhead—“the shaggy top of Mona
high,”—the wide bay “where Deva spreads her wizard stream,” inspired in
Milton some of his wildest and most pathetic strains in speaking of his
loved companion Lycidas, who was lost off these very coasts. The solid
prosaic sense of the Saxon is necessary; the energy and enterprise of the
Norman is useful; have been indispensable to the greatness of Britain;
but do not forget the romance and the song and the sentiment of the
mountains and the minstrels of Wales. Leave a corner in your minds for
the visions of other days. Remember that there are things in heaven and
earth more than our plain homely English philosophy has dreamed of. Such
innocent, beautiful stories and thoughts, from whatever quarter they
come, though not in themselves religious, yet smooth and purify the
course of life. They prepare us for the poetry of parables like the
Pilgrim’s Progress—they prepare us for the poetry of the Psalms and of
the Prophets of the Bible. As these mountains, these bays, these rocks,
which gave to us in their early days our poetic and romantic thoughts,
have, in these later days, given to us our quarries and our harbours and
our lighthouses and our piers, so it is that out of every generous and
inspiring thought there may come at last the most solid, the most useful,
the most comprehensive materials of God’s glory and man’s usefulness.
(2) There is another aspect of this element in the national character of
the old Celtic races.
I have said that the names of the old Welsh saints remind us of the
antique poetic phase of the national British Church. But they also
remind us of its devotional emotions and fervent enthusiasm. We know but
little of St. Cybi or St. Seiriol—those gaunt hermits, wrapped up in
shaggy goat-skins, with their sacred bells and their favourite animals.
But we know thus much—that they were amongst the enthusiastic spirits who
appeared in those dark times to keep up by a strange unearthly presence
the sense of things unseen. And such as they were, with their childish
visions and their solitary musings, such was the old British Church
altogether—hardly ever leaving a permanent impression on the great
practical world without, though producing now and then a holy prelate
like St. David, now and then a holy anchorite like St. Cybi, now and then
a holy heresiarch like Pelagius. And so in later times, the same
passionate religious sentiment has shown itself in the fervour with which
the Welsh people received the ministrations and the influence of John
Wesley and George Whitefield, and the affection with which they clung to
the hymns of their own rude Methodist poets. Amidst much folly and much
obstinacy and much waywardness, all honour to those old saints who
achieved what the Norman prelates could not achieve,—to those Methodist
teachers who reached classes which perhaps could not have been reached by
better and wiser men.
Such enthusiasm is not sufficient by itself to produce true religion; it
is compatible with a very imperfect morality and a very low stage of
Christianity. Still it belongs to the great central fires which keep the
human soul alive, and it has in various forms been God’s special gift to
the Celtic races of mankind, especially in this country. If we were to
remove it out of our national existence England would not be the great
nation that she now is, and the English Church would lose one powerful
means of raising the spiritual energies of the people. “Prove all
things,” says the Apostle, and “hold fast that which is good”; but in the
same breath, he says, “Quench not the spirit,” “Despise not
prophesyings.” Quench not enthusiasm, despise not strong emotions:
labour only to turn them into proper channels, so that they may help to
make men more pure and more truthful—more near to God, more like to
Christ. It is not only in the worship and teaching of our country that
this enthusiasm shows itself. Listen to the account of the gallant deeds
of Welsh soldiers, in the letter of an English officer writing to a
friend, {32} describing the defence of Rorke’s Drift:—
“Private John Williams was posted, together with Private Joseph
Williams and Private William Harrison, in a further ward of the
hospital. They held it for more than an hour—so long as they had a
round of ammunition left.
“When communication was for a time cut off, the Zulus were enabled to
advance and burst open the door. A hand-to-hand conflict then
ensued, during which Private Joseph Williams and two of the patients
were dragged out and assegaied.
“Whilst the Zulus were occupied with the slaughter of those
unfortunate men, a lull took place, which enabled Private John
Williams (who with two of the patients were the only men left alive
in the ward) to succeed in knocking a hole in the partition and
taking the two patients with him into the next ward, where he found
Private Henry Hook.
“These two men together, one man working whilst the other fought and
held the enemy at bay with his bayonet, broke through three more
partitions, and were thus enabled to bring eight more patients
through a small window into the inner line of defence.
“In another ward facing the hill Private William Jones and Private
Robert Jones had been placed. They defended their post to the last,
and till six out of seven patients had been removed.
“Corporal William Allen and Frederick Hitch must also be mentioned.
It was chiefly due to their courageous conduct that communication
with the hospital was kept up at all, holding together at all costs a
most dangerous post, raked in reverse by the enemy’s fire from the
hill. They were both severely wounded, but their determined conduct
enabled the patients to be withdrawn from the hospital, and when
incapacitated by their wounds from fighting, they continued, as soon
as their wounds were dressed, to serve out ammunition to their
comrades through the night.”
Welshmen all of them.
That is the determined enthusiasm which all Welshmen ought to show not
only in the battlefield, but against our worst foes at home—the foes of
intemperance and dishonesty and hypocrisy and deceitfulness.
(3) There is one more addition which the Welsh people, the British
element of our race, has made to the course of English history. There is
something in the Celtic blood, something in the Cambrian stock, which,
mingling with the Saxon and Norman races, has unquestionably produced a
larger result, such as without it would, humanly speaking, have been
difficult or impossible. That poetic refinement, that spiritual fervour,
of which I have already spoken, has, for the most part, been nourished by
seclusion from the active world. Yet there was one channel in which the
old British character displayed itself that directly bore on practical
life—namely, the quick temper, the vivacious intelligence, which impart
to other useful qualities exactly the stimulus they most need. Not
seldom can we trace in families the sudden turn given to a sluggish,
steady, stagnant stock of purely English extraction by contact with the
imaginative, lively, mercurial character of Welsh or Celtic parentage.
And what is thus seen in private life may be also faintly traced in the
great course of our national history.
I will not speak of individuals, though I might mention that two of the
most stirring characters who ever filled the office of Dean of
Westminster were Welshmen: one was Gabriel Goodman, one of the
translators of the Bible, friend of Lord Burleigh; the other was John
Williams, who in his earlier days was twice committed to the Tower, once
by the King, and once by the Parliament, who defended the Castle of
Conway against the army of the Commonwealth, and who now after his stormy
life reposes in the lovely church of Llandegai, the last ecclesiastical
Lord Keeper of Great Britain.
But there is a more general influence which has left its permanent mark
on England. Within that old cathedral of St. David, of which I just now
spoke, the most conspicuous tomb which rises in the midst of it, and
which, according to the tradition of the place, saved the cathedral
itself from destruction, is that of Edmund Tudor, father of Henry VII.
and grandfather of Henry VIII., who, for its sake, spared the venerable
church where it stands. This very church of Holyhead was in great part
rebuilt in the time of Henry VII. son of that Edmund Tudor. The rose of
the Tudor family is visible to this day on its walls. Owen Tudor, the
ancestor of them all, was a native of this island of Anglesey. We are
thus reminded of the fact, which we sometimes forget, that, after Saxon
and Norman and Plantagenet had done their best and passed away, a Welsh
and British dynasty at last was seated once more on the throne of
Britain, and swayed the destinies of the whole empire.
When in Westminster Abbey we pass from the tombs of the earlier kings to
the magnificent chapel of King Henry VII., it is a striking thought to
any one, especially to any one who has a drop of the ancient Welsh blood
in his veins, that he enters there on a new field of the history of
England, inaugurated by a succession of princes whose boast it was to be
descended, not from Edward the Confessor or William the Conqueror, but
from Arthur and Llewellyn, and that about the tomb of the first Tudor
sovereign, intertwined with the emblems of his English descent, is to be
seen the Red Dragon of Cadwallader.
That Tudor race, in their quick understanding, in their fiery temper, the
true representatives of their ancient Celtic lineage, were the
instruments raised up by God’s providence at the critical season of the
new birth of England in the Reformation, for guiding, stimulating,
freshening the Church and the nation to the performance of new duties,
the fulfilment of new hopes, the application of new truths.
The sharpness of wit and liveliness of mind which were amongst the
precocious gifts of Henry and Edward and Elizabeth, were common to them
with their Welsh ancestors, and contributed in no small degree to the
fresh start which England then made in the movements of that moving age.
These qualities, whenever found, though they are not the highest of
gifts, are inestimable for enlivening, cheering, enkindling the more
powerful and the more highly civilised to action and to enquiry. Cherish
them, even if they sometimes outrun discretion; correct them, if so be,
not by repressing them, but by striving to develop the opposite gifts
which are needed to balance and to chasten them.