Christmas Evans

Edwin Paxton Hood

My dear friend, — I believe there is no man living to whom I could so appropriately inscribe an attempt to give some appreciation of the life and labours of Christmas Evans as yourself. Your revered father and he were taken on the same evening into church fellowship in the old communion of Castell Hywel, and within a week of each other they preached their first sermons from the same desk; after this their ways diverged, Evans uniting himself with the Baptist communion, your father joining the independent; still, like two rivers flowing, and broadening, from neighbouring, but obscure springs in the heart of their native Plynlymmon, cheerfully they ran their beautiful course, beneath the providential law of him who chooses our inheritance for us, and fixes the bounds of our habitations. They both served their generation in their own land well, before they fell on sleep. Your father was called “the silver trumpet of Wales,” and the name of Evans rolled like a far-resounding bell among its wild mountains. In their early Christian life they were associates; in their fame, while living, competent judges tell me they were equal; and I have brought them together again. In the memories I have sought to retain in this volume, I have attempted to give some idea of what old wild Wales was when these two brothers in arms arose, and I have attempted to show what the singular institution of preaching effected for the old insulated land. But I am also glad to avail myself of the opportunity thus afforded me to express my sense of mingled admiration, and affection for yourself, and congratulation that the father, who left you an orphan so young, must rejoice, from that cloud of witnesses he so long since joined, to know that you followed him in a successful and happy ministry; while I rejoice, that, unlike him, you have been permitted to enjoy the sunset in a serene and golden old age. May you long enjoy it.

My dear friend,

I am very affectionately

Edwin Paxton Hood.