His field of labour appears to have comprehended a cluster of villages, such as Llangollen, Rhuabon, and Rhosllanerchrugog; and in this region the greater number of his days were passed, excepting that brief period, towards the close of his life, when he became the minister of the great Welsh tabernacle in Cross Hall Street, Liverpool. But he left Wales with a heavy heart, amidst the pretty distinctly expressed dissatisfaction of the people of the Principality, who, however, still insisted on giving him his designation of Williams of Wern. Nor was he away from them long. His old Church continued unsettled, and after three years’ ministry in Liverpool, he returned to Wern, to close his active, and useful life.
His pastorate consisted, really, of three places—Wern, Rhos, and Harwood. It was a singular circumstance, that whilst large crowds thronged round him at the first two places, and while his name was becoming as a sharp arrow through the whole Principality, he made little impression on Harwood. He used to say that Harwood had been of greater service to him than he had been to it; for it was “the thorn in the flesh, lest he should be exalted above measure;” and if he ever felt disposed to be lifted up when he saw the crowds gathering round him at other places, he had only to go over to, or think about Harwood, and this became an effectual check to the feelings of self-inflation, in which he might have been tempted to indulge. It was so, whilst other places, Churches, and congregations, “waited for him as for the rain, and opened their mouths wide as for the latter rain;” whilst upon other fields his “doctrine distilled as the dew,” his stubborn Harwood appears to have been a kind of Welsh Gilboa, upon which no dew fell.
He was claimed as a kind of public property, and Churches at a distance seemed to think they had a right to his services, frequently very much to the irritation of his own people, to whom he might have given the consolation he once administered to a brother minister; “I understand that your people complain a good deal because you so often leave them. Well, let us be thankful that the reverse is not the case; for our own people might have tired of us, and be pleased to hear strangers, and preferred our absence, regarding us as ‘a vessel wherein is no pleasure.’” Unfortunately, in such cases, congregations do not take the matter as philosophically as the old Scotchwoman, who, when she met a neighbouring clergyman one Sabbath morning, wending his way to her own kirk, expressed her surprise at meeting him there, and then. He explained that it was an exchange of services. “Eh, then,” said the old woman, “_your_ people will be having a grand treat the day.”