Roberts · 1904
Evan Roberts and the Revival
On the evening of the thirty-first of October 1904, in Moriah Calvinistic Methodist Chapel at Loughor on the Burry Inlet in West Glamorgan, a twenty-six-year-old former colliery boy and blacksmith's apprentice called Evan Roberts, then a candidate for the Methodist ministry at Newcastle Emlyn, came home for the half-term holiday and asked his minister, the Reverend Daniel Jones, for permission to address the youth meeting after the seven o'clock service. Sixteen young people stayed back. Roberts spoke to them for an hour and then asked them to commit to four points: confess any known sin, give up doubtful habits, obey the prompt of the Spirit promptly, confess Christ publicly. By the end of the meeting all sixteen had stood up. He held a similar meeting the next night, and the next. Within a fortnight, Moriah was full to the doors every night. Within a month, news had spread up the coalfield, and Roberts was preaching in Aberavon, Pontypridd, Cardiff, Caernarfon. By March 1905, by the conservative count of the chapel union, about one hundred thousand new converts had been added to the Welsh Nonconformist congregations, the largest spontaneous religious revival in modern British history. The tradition of the chapels of South Wales is that, on the night of the thirty-first of October 1904 at Moriah Loughor, the country changed.
It is the early evening of the thirty-first of October 1904, in the back room of Moriah Calvinistic Methodist Chapel on the Loughor riverside in West Glamorgan. He is twenty-six years old. He is Evan Roberts, son of Henry Roberts the colliery sinker and Hannah Edwards of the same parish, born at Island House, Loughor, on the eighth of June 1878. He has worked at the Mountain Colliery for twelve years and at the Loughor smithy for two. He is at home, this week, on the half-term holiday from the Calvinistic Methodist preparatory school at Newcastle Emlyn, where he has been studying for the ministry these past nine months.
He has, in the previous spring, had a series of religious experiences that he has described to his fellow students at Newcastle Emlyn in plain terms: that he has been awakened in his bed at one in the morning every night for some three months and held in a state of communion with the Spirit until five, and that the experiences are continuing. The headmaster Evan Phillips, by his own statement, has not known what to do about the boy and has, on balance, given him the half-term off and told him to spend it in his own chapel.
He thinks, sitting in the back room: I have asked the Reverend Daniel Jones for the chance to speak to the young people after the seven o'clock service. The Reverend Daniel Jones has agreed. The young people have, at the seven o'clock service, sat through the message of the Reverend Daniel. They are tired and they want to go home.
He thinks: if I speak to them about my own awakening I will make a fool of myself.
He thinks: if I do not speak to them about my own awakening I will go back to Newcastle Emlyn on Wednesday morning having missed the chance to do what I came home for.
He thinks: I will speak to them about the four points. The four points are not a sermon. The four points are a request.
Sixteen young people stayed back after the seven o'clock service. He spoke to them for an hour. He gave them, by his own later account, the four points of the Methodist call: confess all known sin; put away every doubtful habit; obey the Spirit promptly; confess Christ publicly. He asked them, at the end, to stand if they would commit. Sixteen stood.
By the tradition of the chapel, he was unable to leave Moriah for the next four months. He preached at Loughor every night through November, at the surrounding chapels of West Glamorgan through December, at Pontypridd, Aberavon, Maesteg, the Rhondda, Llanelli, Caerphilly, Aberdare, the colliery valleys to the east, through January and February. The numbers grew. The description of the meetings, by the Western Mail journalist William Stead and by the local correspondents of every Welsh paper through the winter, was the same: he would arrive after the singing had begun, sit at the side of the chapel through twenty or thirty minutes of hymns, stand up to speak briefly, often only for fifteen minutes, and the evening would dissolve into spontaneous prayer and confession from the pews that ran past midnight. The colliery owners of the Rhondda complained, by the late spring of 1905, that absenteeism in the pits was up by a third because the men, having been at the chapel until two in the morning, were unable to start the early shift. The local tradition is that the pit ponies of the Rhondda, by April 1905, had to be retrained because the colliers had given up swearing and the ponies, being accustomed to the curses as the signals, no longer knew what was being asked of them.
The Welsh Revival of 1904–05 produced, by the conservative count of the Calvinistic Methodist Union of June 1905, around one hundred thousand new chapel members across South Wales (the population of South Wales at the time was about a million and a half). By August 1905, after ten months of nightly preaching, Roberts collapsed and was taken into private care by the Penn-Lewis family at Leicester. He retreated almost entirely from public life from 1906 onward. He preached only twice in Wales again (in 1928, briefly, and again in 1930). He died in obscurity at his sister's house in Cardiff on the twenty-ninth of January 1951, seventy-two years old. He is buried in the Penn-Lewis family plot at Loughor cemetery, ten yards from the chapel where he had spoken on the thirty-first of October 1904. The chapel, Moriah Loughor, is still standing and still in regular Methodist use; a bronze plaque on the wall of the chapel vestibule, put up in 1954 on the fiftieth anniversary, marks the spot.