Welsh Journals

and fascinating. Dr Cowley is always eminently fair, and he deals sympathetically with the difficulties experienced with some of its incumbents' foibles. There are many interesting asides. For example, pew rents were not abolished until 1926, when disestablishment had ensured an equitable stipend for every living. Previously, a considerable part of the stipend had come from this source. The stone altar placed in the sanctuary in 1955 (surely 1957?) was all-too-soon out of place with liturgical developments which favoured a westward celebration. This is a book which will give much joy and appreciation to the members of St Paul's Church, but it is also important for the insights it gives into ecclesiastical history. It might well serve as a model to the local historian as to how the history of a parish church should be written. Roger L. Brown Welshpool Robert Pope, Building Jerusalem: Nonconformity, Labour and the Social Question in Wales, 1906-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1998), ISBN 0-7083-1413-9, pp.xiii + 269 (Studies in Welsh History 13). £ 25.00. I am grateful to the editor of this Journal for the opportunity to review the first volume of Pope's two-volume study on Nonconformist Social Theology in the period 906-39, having reviewed the second volume, Seeking God's Kingdom, a year ago. The fact that the University of Wales Press has published the two volumes in different series of monographs is slightly unfortunate, as it obscures how closely related they are. Both are based on the same doctoral research, and both deal with the same themes. Readers should study the two volumes together. The first volume is, not surprisingly, the more general of the two. Partly because of this, it is also the more readable. Pope provides a comprehensive overview of both the writing and the activity of the period amongst Nonconformists concerned with the 'social gospel' and 'the social question'. The only major omission in this volume, again not surprisingly, is the work of the four theologians studied in detail in Seeking God's Kingdom. Should this volume require a reprint, as I hope it will, the publishers would be well advised to provide some cross-references to the second volume. Without such, the occasional references without explanation to Miall Edwards and his three compatriots will be a little puzzling to the general reader.