When “Dr.
Williams, the phrenologist[,][1] .
. . measured [Roberts’s] cranium, deduced certain patterns,” and “told . . .
the young miner, ‘You ought to be a preacher,’” an affirmation also confirmed
by a minister who had heard Roberts pray publicly one time, Evan was guided no
longer to be a miner but a minister.[2]  However, his education for the ministry was
extremely limited, as was his education in general, although he was “deeply
influenced” by “C. R. Sheldon’s In His
Steps.”[3]  Roberts “left school at age twelve, laboured
in coal mines for twelve years, undertook part-time study and a brief
pre-college course . . . [and] had no pastoral or evangelistic experience”[4]
when he became the center of the Welsh holiness revival in 1904, although a
novice (1 Timothy 3:6), one whose “schooldays were few and irregular,”[5]
and “an unqualified preacher with only six weeks of adult pre-college
education.”[6]  Incapable of careful exegesis of the Bible,
he taught “experience-based doctrine” and held to “no dogmatic beliefs,” since
he was “totally untrained” for “systematic theological instruction” or
“expository preaching.”[7]  On the contrary, “visions and voices” were
“what really constitute[d] [him a] pioneer in [the] new movement of the Spirit”
in Wales.[8]  “Evan Roberts was not intellectual . . . was
moved more by his emotions than by his ideas . . . was more intuitive than
inductive or deductive . . . had no fundamental doctrine, no system of
theology, no distinctive ideal.”[9]  He did not follow the pattern of Christ and
the Apostles, as well as of earlier revival preachers such as Jonathan Edwards
or Shubal Stearns, or earlier instruments of revival in Wales,[10]
by preaching boldly and specifically on sin, clearly explaining the death,
burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, calling men to repentance and faith,
and strongly warning about hell and judgment to come (Matthew 5:22-30).  Instead, Roberts set forth “no dies irae to terrify, but a dies caritas to win its way[.] . . .
Sin—or at least vice—[was] seldom denounced[.]”[11]  Indeed, Roberts stated:  “What need have these people [in the Welsh
holiness revival] to be told that they are sinners?”[12]  Some associated with his ministry testified
that they never once preached the gospel to the lost during the entire course
of their revivalistic work; they saw many make what were supposedly salvation
decisions without hearing the gospel.[13]

            Thus, “Roberts does not call his
hearers to repentance . . . but speaks of having been called to fulfill the
words of the prophet Joel.  ‘Your old men
shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.’”  Rather than proclaiming the gospel, Roberts
“frequently describe[d] visions that had appeared to him.”[14]  Surely, in his view, describing visions would
bring more to salvation than gospel preaching. 
He also “told his congregations that he had ‘not come to terrify them by
preaching about the horrors of eternal damnation’” and “told reporters . . . ‘I
preach nothing but Christ’s love,’” after the manner of Hannah W. Smith.[15]  Nevertheless, “his message was not so much
Christocentric as pneuma-centric, a result of the influence of the Holiness
movement, especially the teaching of Keswick.”[16]  Roberts spoke at the Welsh Keswick Conference
at Llandrindod Wells in 1905 at the height of the holiness revival excitement,[17]
and the message he proclaimed throughout Wales during his work was that of the “Spiritual
Life Conventions such as Keswick and Llandrindod.”[18]  While Keswick proper was key for Roberts,
Keswick antecedents, such as the “experience . . . called ‘perfect love’ or
Christian perfection’ taught by J. Wesley and J. Fletcher . . . [were also]
given attention in this revival.”[19]  Thus, while earlier revivals had believed
that the Spirit of God bore testimony to Christ rather than emphasizing His own
blessed Person, Evan Roberts stressed (as William Boardman had before him) that
there “were thousands of believers in our churches who have received Christ,
but had never received the Holy Ghost,” a change of emphasis from “[h]eretofore”
when “the work of Christ ha[d] been the all-important truth.”[20]

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