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Part 24 Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn-Lewis IV. Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn-Lewis Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn-Lewis were the central minister and the most influential expositor,1 respectively, of the Welsh holiness revivalism concentrated from “December 1904 to May 1905,”2 co-opting and eclipsing a genuine revival movement in Wales that had already been taking place. Roberts received infant “baptism a few weeks after his birth on June 8, 1878,”3 and grew up in the Calvinistic Methodist denomination. His “name appears in the church roll for the first time in 1893-94” after taking a “preparation class,”4 but evidence of his own personal conversion is very weak at best.5 A minister claimed that he had been the instrument some time after 1898 of Roberts’ “conversion or consecration,”6 but Roberts himself does not appear to have affirmed that he was born again at that time—indeed, Roberts testified that he was not a Christian until a number of months before the onset of the holiness revival.7 The closest one can come 1 Of course, other men were involved, such as “W. S. Jones,” who not long before 1904 “had a vision,” after which it “soon became evident that God had chosen him to be the first receiver and transmitter of Holy Spirit baptism. Around him there gathered a group of young pastors such as Keri Evans, W. W. Lewis and D. Saunders who sought the same experience” (pgs. xvi-xvii, An Instrument of Revival, Jones). Nevertheless, “Evan Roberts . must be placed at the center of events” (Pg. xviii, ibid.). 2 Pg. 65, Voices from the Welsh Revival, 1904-1905, Brynmor P. Jones. It is worth noting that practically all the resources employed in this study of Roberts, Penn-Lewis, and the Welsh revival are written by men sympathetic or even adulatory of Evan Roberts and Jessie Penn-Lewis and hostile to their critics. For example, one of the least adulatory and most even-handed writers, J. Vyrnwy Morgan, stated that “he would rather burn . [his] manuscript . than be the cause of adversely affecting the work of God through Mr. Roberts . I have . profound regard for Mr. Evan Roberts” (pg. 268, The Welsh Religious Revival, 1904-5: A Retrospect and a Criticism. London: Chapman & Hall, 1909). Morgan notes: “The title of this volume should not be taken as implying any hostility to revivals. Criticism is the science of discrimination, and it is the science upon which this [book] is based” (pg. xi). Other works cited frequently do not hesitate to attack the character, impugn the motives, and employ other unjustifiable tactics to oppose critics of Roberts, Penn-Lewis, and their ministries. They certainly were by no means out to put Roberts or Penn-Lewis in a bad light. 3 Pg. 3, An Instrument of Revival: The Complete Life of Evan Roberts, 1878-1951, Brynmor Pierce Jones. 4 Pg. 5, An Instrument of Revival, Jones. 5 Roberts’ very sympathetic biographer B. P. Jones believes that Roberts was converted “[a]t some point” (pg. 5, An Instrument of Revival, Jones) but gives no specific or certain details or words of Roberts himself about this event which Jones affirms took place. Similarly, S. B. Shaw records Roberts’ birth, youth, and entrance into revivalistic work in the Welsh holiness revival with not a jot or tittle of reference to Roberts’ experience of personal conversion (pgs. 121-125, The Great Revival in Wales: Also an Account of the Great Revival in Ireland in 1859, S. B. Shaw. Chicago, IL: S. B. Shaw, 1905). Nor does W. T. Stead record a syllable that recounts a reasonable personal conversion testimony in his account of Evan Roberts’ life (pgs. 41ff., The Revival in the West, W. T. Stead)—Roberts passes from thinking he is not a Christian to being someone who has visions and encounters with supernatural forces and therefore concluding that he belongs to God. 6 Pg. 9, An Instrument of Revival, Jones. 7 Pg. 41, The Revival in the West, W. T. Stead. “[A]ccording to his own account . he was not a Christian until little more than fifteen months” before Stead wrote his book in 1904 (ibid). 1 from Roberts’ own words to a conversion testimony appears to be a time when he was “taking steps to enter ministerial training” and seeking to be “baptized with the Spirit.” Hearing a “voice . within his troubled heart” about willingness to receive the Spirit, “he went . to the chapel” where he was residing and at that meeting, affirmed: What boiled in my bosom was the verse, “For God commendeth his love.” I fell on my knees with my arms outstretched on the seat before me. The perspiration poured down my face and my tears streamed quickly until I thought the blood came out. Mrs. Davies of Mona, Newquay, came to wipe my face, and Magdalen Phillips stood on my right and Maud Davies on my left. I cried, “Bend Me, Bend Me, Bend Me. OH! OH! OH! . After I was bended, a wave of peace and joy filled my bosom.8 Roberts affirmed that “Living Energy” came and “invaded his soul, burst all his bonds, and overwhelmed him,” and he “gave his testimony at the afternoon service” about this experience “as if it were a kind of conversion or new birth”9 through seeking and receiving Spirit baptism. Evan Roberts testified that a “living energy or force enter[ed] his bosom till it held his breath and made his legs tremble,”10 which he took to be evidence that his sins were forgiven and that the spirit that entered him, hindering his breathing and making his legs wobbly, was the Holy Spirit. Such “bodily agitations . [and] convulsions were the natural and legitimate results of the new birth,”11 in his view, although his landlady turned him out of the house, having “become afraid of him,” fearing “he was possessed or somewhat mad.”12 Although there are not strong grounds to conclude that Roberts was, at whatever point, genuinely converted, and not just the subject of a variety of powerful religious experiences arising from his flesh or from the devil, at least “ever since he had been filled with the Spirit he had been physically conscious of the Spirit’s prohibitions and commands”13 in voices and visions; he “began to have visions”14 from the time of his Spirit baptism and alleged conversion, so that “it is evident that Evan Roberts [was] conscious that he ha[d] received a gift of prophecy through his baptism of the Spirit.”15 Roberts’ experiences were comparable to those of “St. Teresa, Jakob Boehme, George Fox, [and] Ignatius Loyola,”16 having the same 8 Pg. 24, An Instrument of Revival, Jones. Note the discussion by the headmaster of the school where Roberts prepared for the ministry for a few weeks on pgs. 110-112, Psychological Aspects of the Welsh Revival, A. T. Fryer. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 19 (December 1905). 9 Pgs. 23-24, An Instrument of Revival, Jones. 10 Pg. 19, Voices from the Welsh Revival, 1904-1905, Brynmor P. Jones. 11 Pg. 234, The Welsh Religious Revival, Morgan. 12 Pg. 42, The Revival in the West, W. T. Stead. 13 Pg. 108, An Instrument of Revival, Jones. 14 Pg. 111, Psychological Aspects of the Welsh Revival, A. T. Fryer. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 19 (December 1905). 15 Pg. 178, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger. 16 Pg. 180, The Pentecostals, Hollenweger. 2 sources in the spirit world as such Roman Catholic, theosophist, and Quaker luminaries. When “Dr. Williams, the phrenologist[,]17 . measured [his] cranium, deduced certain patterns,” and “told . the young miner, ‘You ought to be a preacher,’” an affirmation also confirmed by a minister who had heard Roberts pray publicly one time, Evan was guided no longer to be a miner but a minister.18 However, his education for the ministry was extremely limited, as was his education in general, although he was “deeply influenced” by “C. R. Sheldon’s In His Steps.”19 Roberts “left school at age twelve, laboured in coal mines for twelve years, undertook part-time study and a brief pre-college course . [and] had no pastoral or evangelistic experience”20 when he became the center of the Welsh holiness revival in 1904, although a novice (1 Timothy 3:6), one whose “schooldays were few and irregular,”21 and “an unqualified preacher with only six weeks of adult pre-college education.”22 Incapable of careful exegesis of the Bible, he taught “experience-based doctrine” and held to “no dogmatic beliefs,” since he was “totally untrained” for “systematic theological instruction” or “expository preaching.”23 “Evan Roberts was not intellectual . was moved more by his emotions than by his ideas . 17 “Franz Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832) developed an early physiological psychology known as phrenology, which held three fundamental positions: the exterior conformation of the skull corresponds to the interior (brain); mind is analyzable into a number of functions (e.g., combativeness, hope, acquisitiveness, cautiousness, and secretiveness); and the functions of mind are differentially localized in the brain, and an excess in any function is correlated with an enlargement of the corresponding place in the brain. [T]he term phrenology mean[s] literally the science of the mind. The theory asserted that personality and character traits could be judged by the location and size of bumps on the skull. Some 37 localized areas of the brain were specified to contain independent and inherited regions relating to such character traits as self-esteem, conscientiousness, and spirituality. Three general character types—mental, motive, and vital—facilitated grouping of personalities.
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