Last week I told the
story of the Welsh Bible. The Bible may have been translated into Welsh, but few
people had one. Here’s a famous story from two hundred years later.
Mari [Mary] Jones was
from a poor family, born in 1784, the daughter of a weaver. She lived in Wales
at the foot of Cader Idris, in a place called Llanfihangel-y-Pennant. She didn’t
have her own Bible, but she wanted one very much. Bibles were scarce in those
days. It took her six years to save enough money to pay for a
Bible, but there was nowhere locally to buy one.
In 1800 she set off to
walk to Bala, 25 miles away, barefoot as usual, to buy a Welsh Bible from the
only place she knew they were for sale. The Rev Thomas Charles sold her a Bible
and was touched by the lengths she was prepared to go to just to get
one.
He later used her story
to propose to the council of the Religious Tract Society to form a society to
provide Bibles to Wales. That society became the British and Foreign Bible
Society, and Mary’s Bible is now in their archives at Cambridge University
Library.
In the ruins of her
cottage there is now an obelisk as a memorial to her and her search for a
Bible. How important is the Bible to you
today?
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