Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/23

 Welsh religious workers, who especially claim generous recognition from the people whose welfare they sought so passionately and unselfishly—John Penry and Griffith Jones of Llanddowror. The twenty-ninth of May next year (1893) will be the three-hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of John Penry. His eyes saw the sorrow and shame of Wales, and his heart bled. Hunted and persecuted by the English Archbishop, he suffered, at the same age as his Divine Master, a martyr's death. But the flames which consumed his young life, in due season, illumined the land he loved so well. "I am a poor young man," he writes shortly before his death, "born and bred in the mountains of Wales. I am the first since the springing up of the Gospel in this latter age that laboured to have the blessed seed thereof sown in these barren mountains . . . The Welsh nation now for many hundred years past have been under the Lord's rod: but I trust the time is come wherein He will show mercy unto them, by causing the true light of the Gospel to shine among them; and, my good daughters!