Unknown Author

Mr. Edgar Jones, M.A., Porth, speaking at a public meeting in connection with the Bridgend branch of the Y.M.C.A. on Friday night, pleaded that the Y.M.C.A. in Wales should be made a thoroughly Welsh institution. He thought the Y.M.C.A. was the only system which would enable Wales to carry out permanently the lessons of the great revival. He came from a district where the immediate effects of the revival, if judged by numbers, were remarkable. But a great disaster had happened during the past few months. It was a charity for the churches to say nothing about it and he did not blame them. There was, it was true, a great accession to the churches in his district, but it was of the boys and girls attending the Sunday schools. The men had gone back, the effects of the revival were rapidly vanishing, and the churches were folding their arms. He had often heard it said that the Y.M.C.A. was not necessary; that some institution could be run in connection with each church. Every attempt of that kind so far had been a great disappointment. People would not attend an institution attached to a church for the same reason that they would not attend that church. To attach an institute to an ordinary church meant that the minister would be largely responsible for conducting it, adding to his worries and perhaps detrimentally affecting the poetic and idealistic traits of his character. Many of the Welsh ministers were not fitted for such work. The Y.M.C.A. was kind of compromise with the material; it met the world halfway. Here was the medium required for making the lessons of the revival permanent in a practical way: Mr T. Gwilym James, organising secretary of the Y.M.C.A. in Wales, gave an address on the growth of the association and on its remarkable work among the Welsh Volunteers, Mr W. G. Cole, hon. secretary of the Bridgend branch of the Y.M.C.A., submitted an encouraging report.