CHARLES, THOMAS Welsh Nonconformist divine, was born at Longmoor, Cartharthenshire, on Oct. 1755, and educated at Jesus college, Oxford, for the Church. He was ordained priest in 1782, and held some curacies in Somersetshire, but he resigned these in 1783 and returned to Wales. He had fallen under the influence of the Welsh revivalists before he went to Oxford, and had Methodist connections. He found no pulpit open to him in the Church in Wales, and joined the Calvinistic Methodists in 1784.
He had already begun to provide classes for poor children in Bala; he now held the classes in the chapel, and gradually began the system of Welsh Circulating Schools, on the model devised by Griffith Jones (d. By 1794 he had 20 travelling masters at work. In 1785 he had become the agent of the Sunday School Society in Wales; he secured supplies of Welsh Bibles from the S.P.C.K. and in 18o1 alone nearly 3,00o were distributed. In 1802 he went to London to place Welsh requirements before the Re ligious Tract Society, and put his case so well that his friends decided to found a society for the publication and distribution of the Scriptures. This was the origin of the British and Foreign Bible Society. He stimulated similar educational movements in Ireland and Scotland. In 1810 he led the movement for the establishing of a regular ordained ministry in the Calvinistic Methodist connection, and, this work accomplished, returned to his task of fostering auxiliary Bible societies. He died on Oct. 5, 1814. Charles compiled the Geiriadur Ysgrythyrol, a biblical dictionary (4 vols. 18o5-o8), which has passed through many editions; he drew up the first definite constitution of the Welsh Methodists, and wrote many Welsh tracts. The first Welsh biog raphy of Charles appeared in 1816. See W. Hughes, Life and Letters of Thomas Charles (Rhyl 1881), in which some of Charles's minor writings are reprinted.