Edwards · 1837
Lewis Edwards founds Bala College
In 1837 Lewis Edwards, then twenty-eight years old, the son of a small farmer of Penllwyn in Cardiganshire, returning to Wales after a degree at Edinburgh and a marriage to Jane Charles (daughter of David Charles of Carmarthen and granddaughter of the Reverend Thomas Charles of Bala, the same minister who had given Mary Jones his Bible thirty-seven years earlier), founded the Calvinistic Methodist Theological College at Bala, on the lake-shore in Merionethshire, in a small house that Jane's grandmother let him have rent-free. The college had three students in its first session. By 1850 it had grown to thirty. By the time of Edwards's death in 1887, after fifty years as Principal, it had trained over a thousand Welsh Calvinistic Methodist ministers, was the foremost theological seminary of the Welsh Nonconformist denominations, and had effectively shaped the chapel-Welsh culture of the second half of the nineteenth century. By the reckoning of every careful historian of Welsh Nonconformity, Lewis Edwards is the principal architect of the Calvinistic-Methodist intellectual life of Victorian Wales, and the founding figure of the Welsh tradition of theology as a serious academic discipline rather than a chapel devotion.
It is the late afternoon of an unrecorded day in the late September of 1837, in the front parlour of the small thatched cottage on Tegid Street, Bala, on the eastern shore of Llyn Tegid, in autumn light. He is twenty-eight years old. He is Lewis Edwards, born at the small farm of Pen-llwyn-y-fedw in Cardiganshire on the twenty-seventh of October 1809, son of Hugh Edwards and Margaret James, schooled at the local circulating school, schoolmaster from sixteen, master of arts of the University of Edinburgh from 1836, married three months ago to Jane Charles, granddaughter of the Mary Jones minister.
On the parlour table, in front of him, are three things: a slate, on which his three students of the new term (David Charles his brother-in-law, Hugh Owen the Carnarvon man, and the unnamed third) have written the day's exegesis of Psalm 19; the prospectus he has drafted for the new college, in his own clerk's hand, headed Coleg Athrofaol Bala (Bala Academic College); and a letter from his father-in-law David Charles, posted from Carmarthen this morning, which says that the committee of the Calvinistic Methodist denominational treasury has, after long deliberation, resolved that no support will be given to the Bala college until it has demonstrated the capacity to train ministers to the standard of the English Nonconformist seminaries.
He thinks: the committee at Carmarthen does not, in plain terms, believe that a college on the lake-shore at Bala can produce a Welsh-language Methodist ministry of the calibre of the English Nonconformist colleges. The committee is wrong about this. The committee is also, however, the holder of the funding.
He thinks: I have three students. I have a cottage rent-free for one year on Jane's grandmother's bequest. I have a salary of nothing.
He thinks: the English Nonconformist colleges do not teach in Welsh. The English Nonconformist colleges teach in English. There is no Welsh-language Methodist seminary in the country.
He thinks: if I do not start now, the Welsh-language Methodist ministry will be, in a generation, an English-medium ministry. The chapels will, in a generation, be English-language. The chapel-Welsh culture of this country will not be a culture in fifty years.
He thinks: there are three young men in the back room reading Psalm 19 in Welsh.
He picks up the prospectus and the slate. He writes a brief letter to his father-in-law that the college will continue without the committee's support, that the next session begins on the first of November, and that the brother-in-law David Charles has agreed to lecture in Hebrew on alternate weeks. He sends the letter to Carmarthen by the morning post. He goes into the back room with the slate and corrects the Welsh of Hugh Owen's exegesis.
Lewis Edwards held the principalship of Bala from 1837 to his death in 1887. He published, through the fifty years, a steady stream of theology, criticism and Welsh-language prose. The Bala college was given formal denominational recognition in 1842, became a federated affiliate of the University of Wales in 1922, and merged with the Aberystwyth college in 1965 to become the Coleg Diwinyddol Aberystwyth and Bala. The original cottage on Tegid Street was replaced by a purpose-built college building in 1869; the building still stands and has, since 2007, been a Welsh-language adult-education centre. By the judgment of every twentieth-century historian of Welsh Nonconformity (R. Tudur Jones, Geraint H. Jenkins, Densil Morgan), the Welsh-language theological tradition is the work of Lewis Edwards. His grave is in the Christ Church (Eglwys Crist) cemetery at Bala, fifty yards from the lake. The headstone is in Welsh: yr Athro Lewis Edwards, athro a chenhadwr, the Professor Lewis Edwards, teacher and missionary.