And what will our readers think, when they find that those who knew Christmas Evans, both at this, and previous periods of his history, declare that his preaching now surpassed that of any previous period? Certainly, his ministry was gloriously successful at Caerphilly. Caerphilly, the village in the valley, became like a city set upon a hill; every Sabbath, multitudes might be seen, wending their way across the surrounding hills, in all directions. The homes of the neighbourhood rang, and re-echoed with Christmas Evans’s sermons; his morning sermon, especially, would be the subject of conversation, in hundreds of homes, many miles away, that evening. The old dame with whom we drank our cup of tea, in her pleasant cottage at Caerphilly, near forty years since, talked, with tears, of those old days. She said, “We used to reckon things as they happened, by Christmas Evans’s sermons; people used to say, ‘It must have happened then, because that was the time when Christmas Evans preached The Wedding Ring,’ or The Seven Eyes, or some other sermon which had been quite a book-mark in the memory.”
No doubt, many grand sermons belong to the Caerphilly period: there is one which reads, to us, like an especial triumph; it was preached some time after he settled in the south; the subject was, “God manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit.” The grand drama in this sermon was the examination of the evidences of Christ’s resurrection:—