Williams · 1762
Pantycelyn and Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah
In the early summer of 1762, in the upstairs room of the farmhouse at Pantycelyn in northern Carmarthenshire that he had inherited from his father in 1742, William Williams Pantycelyn, forty-five years old, the hymn-writer of the Welsh Methodist revival of 1735–62, completed the Welsh-language hymn *Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch* (*Guide me, O thou Great Redeemer* in the standard English translation by Peter Williams of 1771, refined by William Williams's son John Williams in 1772; the standard English title since the eighteenth century has been *Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah*). The hymn was one of about nine hundred Welsh-language and one hundred and twenty English-language hymns Williams wrote between 1744 and his death in 1791, the foundational lyrical body of Welsh-Methodist congregational singing. *Cwm Rhondda*, the hymn-tune to which the English-language version of *Guide me* is conventionally sung, was composed by John Hughes of Pontypridd in 1907 for the centenary celebration of the Capel Rhondda chapel; the pairing of Williams's 1762 Welsh text and Hughes's 1907 Welsh tune is the foundational congregational hymn of the modern Welsh and Welsh-diaspora chapel tradition. *Cwm Rhondda* is the hymn most-commonly sung at the Welsh rugby international match before kick-off, by the Welsh-language post-1990 tradition of the Welsh Rugby Union, with the seventy-five-thousand-strong Cardiff Principality Stadium crowd carrying the three verses by heart in the original Welsh.
It is twenty past five on the late afternoon of an unrecorded day in May or June 1762, in the upstairs writing-room of the farmhouse at Pantycelyn in northern Carmarthenshire, two miles north of the village of Llandovery, in the long evening light of the Welsh upland country in early summer. He is forty-five years old. He is William Williams of Pantycelyn (the conventional Welsh form Williams Pantycelyn, the place-name attached as a distinguishing tag in the Welsh-Nonconformist register-tradition), born at Cefn-coed in Llanfair-ar-y-bryn parish on the eleventh of February 1717 (Old Style; New Style twenty-second of February 1717), son of John Williams the yeoman farmer and Dorothy Williams of Llandysul, schooled at the Welsh-Methodist dissenting academy at Llwyn-llwyd near Hay-on-Wye 1734–37, ordained deacon in the Church of England 1740, refused priest's-orders in 1742 on the Methodist-revival ground that he could not accept the Articles' Calvinist-Anglican-conformity, lay-itinerant-preacher of the Welsh Methodist Calvinistic Association under Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland since 1742.
On the desk in front of him is the finished manuscript of the three-verse Welsh-language hymn Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch in his fine clerk's hand. The hymn is in the five-stress octosyllabic cywydd byr metre that is the foundational Welsh hymn metre of the eighteenth century. The three verses are, in direct translation: Lord, lead me through the wilderness, / poor and weak pilgrim that I am: / I have no strength but as thou dost grant; / live by faith, walk by faith. The imagery is the Israelites' wilderness wandering of the book of Exodus, applied to the Welsh-Methodist-chapel-individual's pilgrimage to salvation.
He thinks: the hymn has to be in the Welsh-language octosyllabic metre that the congregations of the circuit can sing without printed-hymnal. The rural chapels of the Welsh-Methodist circuit do not have printed hymnals. The congregation has to be able to learn the words on the third repetition.
He thinks: the theology of the hymn is the pilgrim's-progress theology of the Calvinistic-Methodist tradition. The individual is the pilgrim. The pilgrim is in the wilderness. The wilderness is the fallen-world. The pilgrim cannot walk without divine-aid. The hymn is, in plain reading, the prayer for the aid.
He completes the third verse in the late evening. He sends the manuscript by the Welsh-Methodist circuit-rider John Thomas to the printer Daniel David at Carmarthen the following week. The hymn is printed in the Pantycelyn collection Caniadau, y rhai sydd ar y môr o wydr (Songs which are upon the sea of glass) at Carmarthen in 1762, the fourth of the twelve Welsh-language hymn-collections Williams would publish in his life.
William Williams Pantycelyn continued as the hymn-writer of the Welsh Methodist revival until his death at Pantycelyn farmhouse on the eleventh of January 1791, seventy-three years old. He had written, by the conservative count of the Hopcyn-Jones bibliography of 1924, about nine hundred Welsh-language and one hundred and twenty English-language hymns. He is the foundational lyrical voice of the Welsh chapel tradition. The Peter Williams English translation of Arglwydd, arwain as Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah (1771, revised by John Williams 1772) became the English-language Methodist hymn most-often translated into other languages (by the 2025 hymnological survey, into about seventy-five world languages).
The pairing with the John Hughes tune Cwm Rhondda (1907) is the foundational congregational-hymn of the modern Welsh chapel and Welsh-diaspora chapel tradition. The pairing is the hymn most-commonly sung at the Welsh rugby international match before kick-off, by the Welsh-language post-1990 tradition of the Welsh Rugby Union, with the seventy-five-thousand-strong Cardiff Principality Stadium crowd carrying the three verses by heart in the original Welsh. The pairing was also, by the personal request of Princess Diana, the recessional hymn at her wedding to the Prince of Wales at St Paul's Cathedral on the twenty-ninth of July 1981. Pantycelyn farmhouse is preserved as a small private museum on the Llandovery road; the upstairs writing-room is, since 1991, marked by a bronze plaque, in Welsh: Yma yr ysgrifennodd William Williams Pantycelyn 'Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch' yn 1762. Here William Williams Pantycelyn wrote 'Lord, lead me through the wilderness' in 1762.