Memoir by John Jenkyn Brown Part 3

The life of a tutor and pastor in a secluded town furnishes few incidents for the biographer to record. Over the college which he was the means of founding he presided for nearly thirty years. It experienced many vicissitudes and discouragements but he faltered not in his course until in 1836 declining health led him to resign other hands that office which he had so long and worthily filled. In the course of his presidency upwards of eighty young men were under his instruction for the Christian ministry and not a few remain to attest their esteem and regard for the tutor and their affection for the man and the Christian.

The church which was formed on the removal of Mr Thomas to Abergavenny was truly a little one. It originally consisted only of four persons besides the pastor and his wife and for years they had no place of worship which they could call their own. The present chapel was erected in 1816 and subsequently enlarged and only a years prior to the pastor s death was improved. To this people the whole of his valuable life may be said had to been devoted. The early zeal and fire of manhood, the mature wisdom and culture of his developed powers and the mellow light and tenderness of age, all were consecrated to them. Every temptation to induce him to change station was steadfastly resisted. Many were those who were his glory and even on earth and it is not too much to hope that many who were of Jesus but secretly will be his of "crown of rejoicing in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming."

The latter years of Mr Thomas's life were spent in comparative privacy. In 1843 he preached the annual sermon for the college of which he had been president and in 1846 he rendered the same service to the college of which he had been a student. In the service of his own flock the evening of his life was especially spent. In the midst of them as in the bosom of his family he loved to dwell. For no pulpit did he prepare with greater carefulness than for his own and among no people did he love to minister as to his own endeared flock. In the very midst of his work and with unimpaired mental powers he was taken to his reward. Only one sabbath intervened between his occupancy of his pulpit and his departure, and the evening preceding his fatal attack he led the devotions of his people in their social meeting for prayer. After a week's severe suffering he yielded his spirit into his Saviour's hands on the 28th of November 1853 in the seventy fifth year of his age, the fifty sixth of his ministry and the forty seventh of his pastorate in Abergavenny.

On the 5th of December his remains were committed to the grave in the burial ground adjoining the place of worship in which he had so ministered and on that occasion signs of sorrow were not confined to ministerial brethren or to the church of which he had been pastor but extended to the whole town. The Rev H Clarke AM of Monmouth read the scriptures and prayed; the Rev T Thomas of Pontypool delivered the address in the chapel and the Rev Thomas Jones of Chepstow spoke at the grave. On the following Sunday the Rev J J Brown of Reading preached to a deeply affected congregation, and many were unable to get admission into the chapel.

It is not the writer's intention to delineate at any length the character of the deceased. To those who had the pleasure of knowing him this is unnecessary and to others it perhaps may be of little advantage. There was one quality which pervaded the whole of his life and character - the strictest  conscientiousness and integrity. It extended from the minutest to the greatest acts in which he was engaged. It gave importance to the simplest duty and animated him in the discharge of the most weighty This quality especially marked his ministry. It was eminently distinguished by faithfulness and simplicity. He did not serve God with that which had cost him nothing. He did not come into the sanctuary with crude undigested rambling thoughts. Ample evidence remains to show with what care and thoughtfulness he prepared for the discharge of ministerial duties. The word of God in which he himself so much delighted and of the meaning of which he was so anxious to attain just views he no less carefully expounded to his hearers. Wide in the range of the subjects on which he discoursed; clear in the perception of the truths he meant to enunciate; precise and fervent in the utterance of his thoughts; out of the inexhaustible treasury he brought forth things new and old/ His views of divine truth neither cramped his appeals to the consciences of the unconverted nor his application of the promises and privileges of the gospel to the believer. In his pastoral relations wisdom and prudence were conspicuous. In patience, tenderness and candour, he ruled over the flock of God committed to his care.

As a man, he practised the truths which he taught. The qualities which marked his style of writing and speaking pre-eminently characterised his own mind as a Christian transparency and simplicity. He was an Israelite indeed in whom was no guile. Whatever differences of opinion might exist between him and any of his brethren, no one doubted the sincerity, integrity and unswerving honourableness of his character. It was one of the felicities of his long life that he survived prejudices which had been excited and was gathered to his fathers amid the love and esteem of all who knew him. He would be foremost in acknowledging and deploring his personal and official deficiencies but the writer would be unfaithful to his convictions if he did not record that there was a completeness of character about the deceased in the minor graces which adorn the Christian life that were blended with the principles which impart to it dignity and glory.

Mr Thomas sent but few of his productions to the press. He has embalmed with affectionate tenderness the memories of many of his Christian friends in the pages of the Baptist Magazine. For the Association with he was connected when at Ryeford he wrote the Circular Letter on Religious Education as a duty of Parents and for the South and Monmouthshire Associations wrote several of their annual epistles. In the heat of the Calvinistic controversy he delivered his sentiments in a sermon on Salvation of Sovereign Grace which was published at the request of the church. In 1841 and 1842 he published his discourses on the baptismal controversy and in 1843 he published the sermon addressed to students of the college of which he had been president.

"THEY THAT BE WISE SHALL SHINE AS THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE FIRMAMENT AND THEY THAT TURN MANY TO RIGHTEOUSNESS AS THE STARS FOR EVER AND EVER."

Memoir by John Jenkyn Brown Part 2

It is impossible at this distance of time to appreciate either the difficulties which he had to encounter or the influence which he has exercised. As the president of a college and as the pastor of a church he had serious obstacles to overcome. He was the pioneer of an educated ministry in Wales. It is not alone in the secluded valleys or on the bleak hills of the Principality that prejudices against a liberal education for the Christian ministry have been found. In England as well as in Wales there existed at that period the utmost indifference if not positive antagonism to learning as a qualification for the ministry. We know that apart from the spiritual and moral qualifications which the gospel demands no learning can avail but we know equally well that where these qualifications are found the value of a sound intellectual training is unspeakable. It was probably a sense of the early disadvantages under which he had laboured and a right appreciation of the value of those which he had enjoyed in Bristol College that led him to contemplate a similar institution for his native land. How highly he valued learning may be concluded from the manner in which he overcame obstacles which would have crushed weaker and less determined spirits from his mastering a language by no means the most facile and tractable so that few would have suspected that Welsh was his native tongue and English an acquired speech and from the conscientious care elaborate and fastidious perhaps to a fault with which he prepared for the discharge of his pastoral duties. It is no small honour to his enlightened and comprehensive views to the largeness of his heart and desires that he should have been the first to suggest and the first to preside over the second institution for training young men for the Christian ministry which the baptist denomination established in Great Britain. Through good report and through evil report he pursued the even tenor of his way. Amid misapprehension discouragement and opposition he was faithful to his trust. Sustained and cheered by the love and fidelity of those who understood and appreciated him he was unmoved by prejudice and opposition. Humble in its origin, slow in its growth, unpretending in its appearance that institution has been a fountain of light and influence to the Welsh people. It is not very easy to estimate the influence which Mr Thomas thus exercised upon the ministry in the Principality. Many doubtless never caught his spirit or reflected his mind. They could neither sympathize with his intellect nor with his heart. The one was too massive and elevated the other too large and catholic for them to comprehend. But there were not a few who did sympathize with him and who reflected in other localities and in milder beams the light which he had shed

It was not simply as a tutor nor merely in the discharge of his duties as a pastor at home that the influence of Mr Thomas was felt. In his general ministry he was eminently distinguished for the maintenance and propagation of and just views of divine truth. The period when he entered upon his ministerial studies in Bristol College is in the annals of religion and especially in the history of the baptist denomination. There existed in close intimacy and in loving action a body and whose names will be had in everlasting remembrance Ryland and Hall and Fuller and their fellow labourers had given an impulse to practical godliness which it had not received since the early days of Wesley and Whitefield. The writings of some, the tuition of others and the preaching of all had tended to awaken the church to a sense of its responsibility and duty. The Baptist Mission to the heathen had just been established and in its reflex influence began to act upon the churches at home. Into the spirit of these eminent men Mr Thomas fully drank. The comprehensive views which they held of the great doctrines of the gospel were embraced with singular clearness and preached with unfaltering confidence by him. While holding as fully and firmly as any man to what are generally recognized as the doctrines of grace he did not hesitate to insist with all solemnity upon the responsibilities and obligations of men. In his mind there was no contrariety between the duty of man and the grace of God. While he preached Christ as the only foundation of human faith and hope he did so "Warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom that he might present every man perfect in Christ Jesus". He did not permit human theories to cramp his free utterance of the gospel message. The fullest and freest invitations of mercy to sinners were consistent in his theology with the highest conceptions of divine sovereignty and the purest views of the graciousness of salvation. With these views matured by a comprehensive and most conscientious study of the sacred oracles he entered upon his duties as tutor and pastor at Abergavenny. It is unnecessary to enter into the controversies which arose on these points and which greatly disturbed his peace but the writer would be wanting in his duty to the departed and in fidelity to the living and in the unspeakable gratitude we owe to the pioneers of free thought and free speech did he not advert to this phase of his life and influence. He broke down the human trammels that bound the free utterance of Christ's message. He cast in a leaven of truth which has well nigh leavened the whole lump. Gradually and silently with ebbs as well as flows but as certainly progressive as the motion of the tides his views have pervaded nearly the whole of South Wales. Where there has been no conscious renunciation of old sentiments and no avowed and formal adoption of new, there has been a silent though perhaps unconscious modification of those long held. It was at the close of his labours as president of the college that he could gratefully record that "both teachers and the taught began freely to breathe the universally benign atmosphere of that blessed economy which is alike and without difference good tidings of great joy to all people; on earth peace and good will toward men". He has laboured, others have entered into his labours. "With a great price" he purchased his freedom others have been "born free" through his fidelity labours and sacrifices.

Memoir by John Jenkyn Brown Part 1

Following his death in 1853, the following year a memoir by John Jenkyn Brown (d 1907) appeared in The October edition of The Baptist Magazine.

MEMOIR OF THE LATE REV. MICAH THOMAS, OF ABERGAVENNY.

BY THE REV. JOHN JENKYN BROWN.

It is natural that we should hold in grateful remembrance the benefactors of our race. Almost every city has some son whom it delights to honour and every country some patriot whose life and actions it loves to record. The annals of the Christian church present us with a cloud of witnesses whose examples constitute a rich heritage and in whose steps we are to follow. The long period over which his ministrations extended, the varied and important services which he rendered and the wide and lasting influence which he exercised over the prosperity of the baptist denomination in South Wales entitle the late Rev Micah Thomas to an honoured and affectionate place in the memory of the church of Christ.

The subject of this brief sketch born in the parish of Whitstone in the county of Monmouth on the 19th February 1778. His parents were of the class called yeomen. Of his early life but few particulars have been preserved; and his history during the first twenty-three years may be compressed into a few sentences It would appear that in the town of Usk and in the neighbouring hamlet of Glascoed there were many who held baptist sentiments and among these scattered followers of the Saviour he seems to have first experienced the power of divine truth. He himself gratefully records that when he was seventeen years of age he was baptized at the Glascoed church and subsequently united in fellowship with the church at Penygarn near Pontypool. In about a year and a half afterwards he was called upon to exercise his gifts as a minister and was much engaged in preaching in the neighbouring churches.

In his twenty third year he entered Bristol College then under the presidency of Dr Ryland. The tutor and student were of congenial dispositions and though his stay in college was but short the intimacy there formed ripened into a friendship which terminated only by the death of the former and which doubtless has been renewed by the removal of the latter to the society of the blessed.

While at Bristol College Mr Thomas accepted an invitation to the pastoral office at Ryeford in the county of Hereford. In September 1802 the relation thus entered into was recognised by a public service on which occasion Dr Ryland delivered the charge to the pastor from John xii 26. In this place he laboured with honour and success for six years whence in 1807 he removed to Abergavenny.

This town situated in one of most lovely valleys in Monmouthshire, watered by the crystal stream of the Usk and surrounded by the most striking and picturesque hills, Thomas was wont to visit when sustaining the office of pastor at Ryeford. In this neighbourhood resided a family, whose ancestors had been among the most influential and honoured in the baptist community and whose names are still fragrant among the churches, and whose descendants remain true to their principles and illustrate their virtues. Into this congenial circle Thomas was introduced and in Mrs John Harris of Govilon he found a kindred spirit. As women were ministers to the Redeemer and were fellow helpers to Paul so this Christian lady exercised not a little influence upon the life and labours of our departed friend. At this period there was no baptist church at Abergavenny though there was preaching in the Welsh language and occasionally in English in connection with the church at Llanwenarth. Mr and Mrs Harris appear often to have communed on the interests of the Redeemer's kingdom; to her he seems have suggested the idea of a college and into his views she most heartily and zealously entered. The result was that he removed to Abergavenny to undertake the pastorate of a church yet to be formed and the presidency of a yet to be established college. The residence of Mr Thomas at Ryeford was a season of preparation and there is evidence that by giving himself to reading he availed himself of its advantages; but this town was his real field of labour and for forty-seven years with unwearied perseverance and constancy he pursued his course.