Mary Jones and her Bible

Great institutions are not always founded by great men in council. Sometimes they are founded by a child on a road, and the men in council only write down afterward what the child has already decided. The Word in two hundred tongues, the presses of London and Calcutta and Cape Town, the missionary societies of a whole century: all of these begin, if one cares to trace the line back, with a pair of bare feet on a sheep track in Merionethshire, and a linen purse that has been six years filling.

THE GIRL ON THE HILL FARM

Her name is Mary Jones. She is sixteen years old in the summer of 1800, and she lives at Tyn-y-ddôl below Cader Idris, in the parish of Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, where her mother weaves and her father is dead. She has been able to read since she was eight, taught at one of Thomas Charles's circulating schools by a master who came up the valley for three months and then moved on. She practises her reading on a Bible kept at the farm of the Evanses, two miles off, because there is no Bible in her own house in any language. There is, in this decade, scarcely a Welsh Bible to be had for love or money. The 1799 edition of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge has been exhausted; the chapels keep what they have under lock; the gentry have theirs on the shelf and the poor go without. A Welsh Bible costs three shillings and sixpence, which is more than her mother earns in a fortnight at the loom. So at nine years old, Mary begins to save. She keeps hens. She gathers wood. She minds neighbours' children. Each copper goes into a linen purse, and the purse goes into the rafters, and the years go by.

THE ROAD TO BALA

She leaves the cottage at first light. It is a morning in the high summer of 1800. She carries her shoes in her hand, because the shoes are her only pair and the road will eat through them, and the purse is tied at her waist, and she has eaten nothing because she is not hungry. The road climbs east out of the valley, over Bryn Mawr, down toward Dolgellau where the slate roofs come into view through the morning mist; then up again, through bracken and gorse, with the sheep watching from the slopes. She fords the Dysynni at the knee. She passes drovers going the other way with their black cattle, and a hooded woman with a milk pail, and three men cutting peat above Llanycil who watch her go and say nothing. The metalled stretches are easier on the feet than the sheep tracks; the sheep tracks are easier than the stony places where the rain has cut channels. Twenty-six miles. By midday the soles of her feet are raw. By the time she sees the long grey water of Llyn Tegid below her, and the slate roofs of Bala beyond, her feet are bleeding, and the purse against her hip is the heaviest it has been in six years.

THE MINISTER IN HIS SHIRT-SLEEVES

Thomas Charles is sixty years old. He has been at Bala twenty-five years. He has sent more boys into the Methodist ministry from this house than any man in north Wales; he has written tracts and run circulating schools and translated catechisms; he has gone, in his middle age, near to ruin twice in the labour of putting readable Welsh into the hands of poor children. He is in his shirt-sleeves and his spectacles when his housekeeper comes to find him. There is a girl in the hall, she says. He goes through. The girl is sixteen, perhaps. Her hair is dark and plastered with sweat. She is carrying a pair of shoes in one hand. Her feet, on his clean tile, are stained with road and with blood. There is a linen purse against her hip, and the weight of it has made the cloth at her waist shine. He asks her, in Welsh, where she has come from. Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, syr. He does the arithmetic in his head. Llanfihangel is twenty-six miles by the road that is metalled in some stretches and a sheep track in others. He has himself walked that road once, years ago, in better shoes than these. She has come for a Bible, she tells him.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A HALLWAY

He has three Welsh Bibles in the house, and not one of them is free. The Williamses at Llandderfel have spoken for the first. Old Mr Edwards at the chapel has been waiting three months for the second. The third was promised yesterday morning to a deacon at Llanfor whose own Bible was burnt with his cottage in the spring. There is no fourth. There has not been a fourth in this hall in eighteen months, and the next consignment out of London is six weeks at the earliest, if the vessel does not founder in the Irish Sea. He has given his word to three families. He is the minister for those three families. He looks down at the tiles, at the smear of blood, at the shoes in her hand. He looks at the linen purse, which she has not yet untied. He thinks of the twenty-six miles, and then of the twenty-six miles she will walk home. He thinks of his own Bible, the one his father gave him at his ordination at twenty-two, sitting on the second shelf of the small library behind the door. Forty years he has read out of that book. He has marked it in pencil and the binding is twice mended and he has preached every sermon of his life from that volume. A Bible, he thinks, is a means. He goes into the library. He comes back with the black book in his hand and puts it, without a word, into hers.

THE WALK HOME

She unties the purse. He counts out three shillings and sixpence and waves the rest away. She takes the Bible against her chest and goes out into the afternoon. The road back is the road she came by, but she carries it differently now: the weight against her ribs, the linen at her hip lighter than it has been since she was nine. The long climb out of Bala. The descent toward Dolgellau in the long northern light. The Dysynni at dusk. She reaches Tyn-y-ddôl that night or the next; the record is not certain, and it does not finally matter. What matters is that the book is now in a house in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant that had no book in it, and that the man in Bala is sitting at his desk after dark with his glasses off and his eyes shut, and that he has begun, already, to compose in his head the question he will put four summers later to a room of ministers in London.

THE ROOM IN LONDON

On the seventh of December 1804, in a hall in the Old Jewry, the Religious Tract Society convened to hear Thomas Charles of Bala speak. He told them of the girl. He told them of the road. If for Wales, he asked, why not for the kingdom; why not for the world? The phrasing in the minutes is not his exactly, but the question is. Joseph Hughes, the Baptist minister of Battersea, rose and answered it with a sentence that became the founding sentence of an institution: If for Wales, why not for the empire and the world? The British and Foreign Bible Society was constituted that winter. Within a generation it had put the scriptures into print in more than two hundred languages, in places Charles never saw and Mary did not know existed: in Bengali and in Tamil, in Xhosa and in Mohawk, in Mandarin and in modern Greek. The presses ran in Calcutta and at Serampore and at Cape Town. The ministers who sat in that hall did not know, when they rose to vote, that they were voting on what a sixteen-year-old in Merionethshire had already decided in a hallway four years before.

THE BOOK ON THE SHELF

Mary Jones walked home with the Bible at her chest and lived another sixty-four years. She married Thomas Lewis, a weaver, in 1813. She bore children and buried some of them. She read the same Bible to the end of her sight, and when her sight failed she read it from memory. She died in 1864 at Bryn-crug, and was buried there. The book she carried out of Bala that afternoon is now in the Cambridge University Library: the writing not faded, the binding twice repaired, the leather dark with handling. It was not the Bible Thomas Charles had meant her to walk away with. It was the one off his own shelf. Great institutions are not always founded by great men in council; sometimes the men in council only ratify, in formal language and on headed paper, what a child has already settled in a hallway, with bleeding feet, and a linen purse, and a question put in Welsh.