Cylchgronau Cymru

'Welsh Keswick' at Llandrindod Wells in August 1906. More directly, he was taken under the wing of Jessie Penn-Lewis who was a trustee of the Keswick Convention until she withdrew from it in 1909.77 It seems that Evan Roberts did come to doubt the propriety of such extreme concentration on the Holy Spirit. In the book which he co-authored with Jessie Penn-Lewis, War on the Saints (Leicester, 1912), can be found the following passage: 'To place the Holy Ghost as the object of obedience, rather than God the Father through the Son and by the Spirit, creates a danger of leading believers to rely upon a "spirit" rather than God on the Throne who is to be obeyed by the child of God, united to His Son, the Holy Spirit being the media [sic] through whom God is worshipped and obeyed.' The meaning of the passage is obscure in the extreme. It has to be understood within the context of the belief, shared by Roberts and Penn-Lewis, that Christians were under constant attack by malign spirits which could masquerade as the Spirit of God and thus mislead the believer. What is unclear, however, is how the believer could discern that he or she was hearing 'God upon the Throne' or, for that matter, the Holy Spirit, rather than those malign spirits. The role of the cross Roberts's emphasis on the cross, on the significance of Christ's atoning work, came very late in the day indeed it was perceived only towards the end of the revival period. Usually this has been interpreted as a sign of Roberts's orthodoxy in turning his congregations away from themselves to consider the crucifixion and its implications for the forgiveness of sin. On the cross, he said, human sin is judged and forgiven. Nevertheless, even here Roberts told his congregations to pray to the Spirit that he show them Calvary, in an almost mystical way. Even at the end of the revival, his appeal was not to the testimony of scripture but to the congregation to receive a Spirit-given experience. On 21 January 1906, at Tabernacle chapel, Porthmadog, he introduced Pantycelyn's hymn 'Gwaed dy groes sy'n codi i fyny' (The blood of the cross raises up) with the words: 'Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. If we gain a glimpse of the blood.Let us ask the Spirit to lead us to Calvary.'78 This was the doctrine of Identification with the Crucified One which was central to the teaching of his patron, Jessie Penn-Lewis. She had taught, since at least 1898 and the publication of her pamphlet Pathways to Life, that believers had to be fully crucified with Christ, prior to being filled with the Spirit, or else they would always fall prey to the wiles of the evil one. While this is, ostensibly, the same as the claim of St Paul that he had 'been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live but Christ lives in me' (Gal. 2:20), in fact it 77 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 196. 78 Tudur Jones, Faith and the Crisis of a Nation, 330; Herald Cymraeg (26 December 1905), 8.