Lewis Edwards founds Bala College

A language is not lost in a single ruling, nor saved in one. It is lost or saved in the small rooms where the next generation of its teachers are taught, and in the choice of which tongue the lesson is given. The men who hold those rooms are seldom famous in their own lifetimes. They are schoolmasters, ministers, the sons of small farmers, and they make their decisions on autumn afternoons, with a slate in one hand and a letter from a committee in the other.

THE SON OF PEN-LLWYN

Lewis Edwards was born on the twenty-seventh of October 1809, at the small farm of Pen-llwyn-y-fedw above the Rheidol in Cardiganshire, the son of Hugh Edwards and Margaret James. The country he grew up in was the country the Reverend Thomas Charles of Bala had remade thirty years earlier: a Wales of circulating schools, of Sunday schools held in farmhouse kitchens, of a Calvinistic Methodist denomination only just secured, in 1811, as a body separate from the Established Church. He was schooled at the local circulating school, taught himself Latin and Greek out of borrowed books, and stood as a schoolmaster from the age of sixteen. In 1833 he walked, with a small purse and a letter of introduction, to the University of Edinburgh, the only place where a poor Welshman of his persuasion could read for a degree. He took his master of arts in 1836. In June of 1837 he married Jane Charles of Carmarthen, daughter of David Charles the hymn-writer, granddaughter of Thomas Charles of Bala, the same minister who, in 1800, had given a barefoot girl from Llanfihangel-y-Pennant the Welsh Bible she had walked twenty-six miles to buy. The two men he descended from by marriage had given Wales its scriptures and its hymns. There remained the question of who would give it its theologians.

TEGID STREET, LATE SEPTEMBER

The cottage stood on Tegid Street in Bala, a small thatched house on the eastern shore of Llyn Tegid, granted to the new couple rent-free by Jane's grandmother out of her own widow's portion. The lake was high that September, the bracken on the Aran already turning. He had three students. David Charles his brother-in-law, Hugh Owen up from Carnarvonshire, and a third young man whose name the registers do not preserve. They sat at a deal table in the back room and worked through the Psalter in Welsh, with the Hebrew on Edwards's knee. The first session of the new college, which he had named on its prospectus Coleg Athrofaol y Bala, had opened on a Monday morning with a prayer in Welsh and a chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. He was twenty-eight years old. His salary was nothing. His library was the books he had carried back from Edinburgh in a sea-chest.

THE LETTER FROM CARMARTHEN

On an unrecorded afternoon in the last week of September, the post from Carmarthen brought a letter from his father-in-law. The committee of the denominational treasury had at last met. The committee had at last deliberated. The committee had resolved that no monies of the connexion would be released to the college at Bala until the college had demonstrated its capacity to train ministers to a standard equivalent to that of the English Nonconformist seminaries at Highbury, at Homerton, at Hackney. He read the letter through twice, sitting at the parlour table with the slate of the day's exegesis still in front of him. Through the wall he could hear the three students arguing, in Welsh, over the construction of the nineteenth verse. The light off the lake came in low through the window and fell across the prospectus he had drafted in his own clerk's hand.

A SECOND OF TIME ON THE LAKE-SHORE

The committee was not, in any plain sense, wrong. The English colleges had endowments, libraries, established chairs. Bala had a thatched cottage and three young men. The reasonable course, the course a careful and obedient man would take, was to suspend the session, write a respectful reply, and present himself at Carmarthen in the spring with a costed proposal and a list of subscribers. He was, by nature and by upbringing, a careful and obedient man. He weighed the letter on his palm. The committee held the funding. The committee did not hold the language. There was, in the whole of the Principality, no Welsh-medium seminary for the Methodist ministry; the English colleges taught in English, and a generation of ministers trained in English would, in the natural course of one further generation, give the chapels in English; and the chapels going in English would, in fifty years, end the chapel-Welsh that was the only literary Welsh the country still had. He thought, briefly and without sentiment, of Mary Jones walking barefoot to his wife's grandfather for a Bible in her own tongue. He thought of the three voices in the back room. He picked up his pen. The hinge of the matter was not whether the Bala college could match Highbury. The hinge of the matter was that if he closed the parlour door now, he would not open it again. He drew the inkwell towards him.

THE REPLY

He wrote a short letter to David Charles at Carmarthen. The college would continue without the support of the connexion. The next session would open on the first of November as advertised. His brother-in-law had agreed to lecture in Hebrew on alternate weeks. He himself would take dogmatics, logic, and the Greek Testament. He folded the letter, sealed it, addressed it for the morning post, and set it on the hall table. Then he went into the back room with the slate, sat down on the bench beside Hugh Owen, and corrected, in pencil, the Welsh of the young man's exegesis of the nineteenth Psalm. The lesson ran until dark.

THE LONG SESSION

The connexion came round, as he had calculated it would, once the college had something to show. Formal denominational recognition was granted in 1842. By 1850 there were thirty students; by 1860, fifty. He held the principalship for fifty years without interruption, lecturing six days a week in Welsh, publishing through Y Traethodydd, the quarterly review he founded in 1845, the essays in dogmatics and biblical criticism that gave Welsh Nonconformity its first sustained engagement with German theology and Scottish philosophy. He trained, in the half-century he sat at Bala, over a thousand ministers, and through them the chapel culture of Victorian Wales: the eisteddfod-going, hymn-singing, sermon-reading, Beibl-reading culture that carried the Welsh language through the industrial century when every economic incentive was against it. The thatched cottage on Tegid Street was replaced in 1869 by a stone college building, which still stands. He died on the nineteenth of August 1887, in the principal's house, of a stroke, at the age of seventy-seven. R. Tudur Jones, writing a hundred years later, gave the verdict the denomination itself had long since arrived at: that the Welsh-language theological tradition is, in any serious accounting, the work of Lewis Edwards.

A language is saved by the room in which it is taught, and by the man who refuses to close the door of that room when the funding body advises him to. The decisive instruments are small. A slate. A prospectus in a clerk's hand. A letter going out to Carmarthen by the morning post. His grave is in the Christ Church cemetery at Bala, fifty yards from the lake he taught beside for fifty years. The headstone, in Welsh, reads yr Athro Lewis Edwards, athro a chenhadwr: the Professor Lewis Edwards, teacher and missionary.