Taking up his first post, as the new minister of the Bethlehem Forward Movement Church in Port Talbot, South Wales, Martyn Lloyd-Jones told his congregation that his mission was ‘to prove to you not merely that Christianity is reasonable, but that ultimately … nothing else is reasonable’ (p. 63). Here, from the mouth of the twenty-seven-year-old, was the strength and weakness of a remarkable ministry in a single sentence. Lloyd-Jones was a mesmerising preacher and an inspiring writer, who commanded an international following. He was also a tireless polemicist who divided the Evangelical movement in Britain with his fierce separatism, unreconstructed anti-Catholicism and dogmatic hostility to the methods of modern revivalism. ‘If Dr Martin [sic] Lloyd-Jones talks like this at twenty-five’, commented the South Wales News after a jeremiad on ‘The tragedy of modern Wales’, ‘we tremble to think what he will say about us when he is fifty’ (p. 157). It cannot be said that he mellowed with time. At a time when the Catholic Church was undergoing bracing aggiornamento in the 1960s, Lloyd-Jones was still warning his followers that ‘Roman Catholicism is the devil's greatest masterpiece’ (p. 232). He held the ecumenical movement in similar esteem, he feared that ‘the typical Englishman’ is more susceptible to doctrinal compromise (p. 305) and more prone to ‘the sin of quenching the Spirit’ (p. 95) than persons of other nationalities, he dismissed the influential Keswick ‘holiness’ convention as ‘the Evangelical Ascot’ (p. 103), and he felt that the example of Elijah in dealing with the priests of Baal was insufficiently appreciated by exponents of modern revival techniques: ‘The tragedy of the present hour is that the church has tolerated the heretics’ (p. 109). Lloyd-Jones had a soft spot for the charismatic movement, but even here, the urge to curate the Christianity of his day overwhelmed the desire to affirm: ‘I have never been satisfied with any speaking in tongues that I have heard’ (p. 130). So he contented himself with attacking Reformed theologians who limit the activity of the Spirit, rather than publicly endorsing a movement that he privately admired. The cumulative sense of these sympathetic, scholarly but occasionally indulgent essays is of a luminous talent increasingly wasted on intemperate and, it must be said, ill-informed polemicism. One essay simply reproduces Lloyd-Jones's hostility to the ‘prostitution’ of modern preaching, with little criticism. Mostly, however, the essays are balanced without perhaps taking the reader beyond Evangelical apprehensions about ‘mixed’ denominations or ‘the spectre of ecumenism’ (p. 73). There is an understandable expectation of an Evangelical readership, though I would have liked more interrogation of Lloyd-Jones's visceral antipathy to ecumenical dialogue. The finest piece in the collection is John Coffey's article on ‘Lloyd-Jones and the Protestant past’, which elegantly explores the preacher's uses and abuses of history and raises important questions about the role of historical memory in church ministry. Overall, these essays represent a valuable contribution to the study of twentieth-century Evangelicalism and a sobering commentary on the enduring fascination of heresy.