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allegations of financial mismanagement, arguments over slavery, and the vicissitudes of the War of Independence were, as Dr Welch says, "her biggest problem and her worst failure." Finally, Dr Welch leads us through the initiatives of the final years of Lady Huntingdon's life [she even had ideas for a mission to Paris at the height of the French Revolution] and the attempts to find an effective organisational structure for carrying on the work when she was gone. If I have one criticism of this book, it goes to the subtitle. "Reassessment" seems to me to promise a consideration of the subject's life in the context of the broader movement of which her work was a part. Yet we are given very little by way of analysis of the Revival, or indication of the extent to which the countess's connection was typical or atypical of 18th century evangelicalism. There is little to indicate what Lady Huntingdon was converted from, or much discussion of the doctrines of the connection and why the breach with the Wesleyans was so bitter and [to the protagonists] so important. The recent literature on the 18th century church and the revival appears hardly at all in Dr Welch's footnotes. But what he has given us a reconstruction of the life of this remarkable woman that is unlikely ever to be seriously challenged on points of fact will be a major contribution to future studies of the revival. It is good for the spotlight to be directed for once away from Wesley and onto the Calvinistic Methodists. I hope that Dr Welch's book and my own forthcoming study of the countess's connection will be part of a redirection of attention to this important, but often neglected, aspect of the evangelical revival. Alan Harding Potters Bar William Gibson, Church, State and Society 1760-1850 [London & New York, Macmillan & St Martin's Press, 1994]. x + 209pp. ISBN 0-333-58756-1 [hardback], 0-333-58757-X [paperback]. Bill Gibson's writing over the last decade, including papers in the Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, have identified him firmly with that group of scholars who are offering us fresh interpretations and enriching our understanding of the state of the church in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In this his first book he draws together the findings and insights of a wide range of modern scholarship to present in an accessible way an