Welsh Journals

quite sufficient to show that it could not have been a font, but was evidently a stoup for holy water. We think it is a great pity that in so important a work on Church plate the author should have mixed the matter upon which he has the advantage of a very special training, with so many other entries bearing upon departments of ecclesiology where he evidently has not like expert knowledge, or did not take his subject with anything like the same seriousness of purpose. Yet another grievance we feel bound to ventilate. Why has Mr. Evans adopted so strange a spelling for Welsh names. He con- sistently writes v for f, so that we have the recurring ugly forms- Llanvair and Llanvihangel. Worse still, what are we to make of Llandygwy (for Llandygwydd), Llangwryddon for (Llangwyryfon) and Llanddewi-Vrevi ? Affected archaisms of this sort are entirely out of place in a work of reference. Much of this book is depressing reading, through no fault of the author's, but simply because he faithfully chronicles the desolate, and sometimes filthy, state of the churches he visited. In no less than 15 cases (and there are in reality more) does the entry occur "there are here no ornaments on the altar." The words as we read them called up vision after vision of desolate, forlorn and uncared for sanctuaries, which bespeak a cold and unsympathetic stepmother rather than the spiritual mother of a romantic and imaginative race, and which are scarcely distinguishable in the interior from the Dissenting Chapels which, thronging the hill-sides around, compete all too successfully for the allegiance of the sons and daughters of Wales. The Other Side of Death, by the Rev. R. Jones. Pitman, 2/- net. In these sad days of huge death rolls and desolated homes, the problem of the other side of death calls for earnest consideration, although it is no new problem. Death is almost as old as the hills, but in Wales, and in a lesser degree in England, there has been a peculiar reticence in dealing with the continuity of the life of the soul after it has vacated its fleshly tabernacle, with the natural consequence that comfort has been denied the bereaved because there is so little right knowledge of the probable conditions of the life beyond the grave. We welcome the Rev. R. Jones' lectures because they place before us some elementary facts, possessed of which we may embark on a fuller course of study. At the outset the writer clears the ground by disposing of the question of the legitimacy of the desire to know about the inter- mediate state, but he rightly reminds us of the impossibility of knowing everything." He proves the continuity of personality, bringing the evidence of some modern scientists to bear on the question. The unjustifiable