Ann Loades, The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2021), pp. 96. ISBN 978913657574.

helped win their loyalty and there were no rebellions in Wales. The reforms, however, were accepted without real enthusiasm. To most Welsh people, worship in English was more strange than in Latin, but when both the Bible and Prayer Book were eventually translated into Welsh, it made the faith more intelligible. Yet if Wales was a Protestant nation and not a nation of Protestants, ironically it was those translations by Anglican divines that helped convert much of the population to nonconformity in the following centuries. Much of that conversion was down to eighteenth-century Methodist societies, which meant to revive Anglicanism from within, yet bearing the seeds of secession from their inception, because they transcended parish boundaries and were not accountable to the bishops. The intransigence of the latter was to lead to separation. Disestablishment eventually followed as all nonconformist denominations experienced phenomenal growth in the nineteenth century yet their members still had to pay tithes to the Established Church. The latter’s response both pastorally and spiritually came too late to avoid the break. Wales can hardly be called a Christian country today, when less than one per cent of its population regularly attend worship. The nonconformist revival was short lived and by now the disestablished Anglican church has also declined drastically in membership. The Roman Catholic Church has seen some small growth as a result of the influx of Roman Catholics from Eastern Europe. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the Christian faith has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. Rowan Williams reminds us in the preface, quoting the poet R.S. Thomas, that although we may be ‘living in the last quarter of the moon of Jesus’, it was that same poet who went on to say ‘people are becoming pilgrims again’ and ‘prayer too has its phases’. Who can therefore predict what the future might hold, if the history of the Christian faith over the last millennia is anything to go by?