Cylchgronau Cymru

of the rural deans at Llandaff, Bishop Ollivant resisted the perennial request that the shortage of clergy in the diocese should be solved by ordaining into holy orders more and more untrained men of humble origin who had the necessary pastoral vocation but no formal academic qualifications. In opposition to evangelical demands he insisted in fact in the 1860's on rigid qualifications for ordination. The divinity schools at Cowbridge and Abergavenny, which had for thirty years or more given many the minimum training to enable men to qualify for ordination as literates, were closed, and Ollivant insisted from all candidates a broad academic education at a university or theological college.54 At the Welsh Church Congress held at Llanidloes in 1869 Griffith bitterly attacked this policy, arguing that the Church did not need men trained in the finer points of Greek and Latin but men of vocation who were Welsh speaking and who were able to work amongst the poorer classes. He claimed that the theological college at Lampeter, the main source of clergymen in Wales, had taught 170 students since 1862, all of whom were the sons of farmers, gentlemen, clergymen or tradesmen. Only one student had been the son of a labourer.55 The Church remained the Church of the upper classes-of the uchelwyr-and for this reason, argued Griffiths, it had failed to make significant headway in either rural or industrial Wales. Relations between John Griffith and Bishop Ollivant were also embittered in these years by the growing controversy which raged over ritualism. Ritualism or Anglo-Catholicism entered south Wales in 1866 through the rural parishes of Llanvaches and Caldicot in Monmouthshire. In the next four years the Ritualists made dramatic progress, capturing one parish after another. They gained an important advantage in 1868 through the conversion to Roman Catholicism of the third Marquis of Bute. He was the largest private patron of Church livings in south Wales, and in later years he used this power to present Ritualists to many of the large industrial parishes. Ollivant provoked Griffith and the evangelicals by his dilatory and moderate attitude towards the Ritualists. The Star of 54 N.L.W. LL/Ch/31. John Griffiths, The Welsh Church Congress at Llanidloes. What did it aim at? (1869), pp. 4-9.