How must those who preach the Gospel speak if they arc to be listened to? For the sociology of religion this is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Here in Wales audibility seems to have varied over the years right up and down the scale. Two hundred years ago the chapels were unbuilt, the cathedral of the Archbishop of Wales was in ruins, and the Gospel message was heard hardly above a whisper. But come forward a century, to around 1850 or 1880, and the same message is heard so loudly as to drown everything else. The Church of England, presently to be the Church in Wales, is back on its feet. ‘These eminent propagandists of the Faith, the Irish’, as a contemporary priest at Maesteg called them, begin to pour in even before the Famine. Above all, the chapels are being built, literally in their hundreds. ‘Sin and savagery’ is how one historian describes the Glamorgan and Monmouth valleys in the early Industrial Revolution. Yet this chaotic, rootless proletariat was converted in a couple of generations into Christian communities, centred round the chapels, one of the greatest triumphs of evangelism in modem times. But come on yet another century, to the present day, and the picture changes again. The proportion of regular church- or chapel-goers to the population has in many places been halved, though still remaining far higher than in England. The influence of Christianity in work or leisure or politics is a mere shadow of what it was. The Free Churches can still stop the Cardiff Students’ Union from having a bar. But they cannot stop the Sunday shifts which—-with, admittedly, other things—have led two-thirds of Port Talbot people, in a recent questionnaire, to put down Sunday as ‘just like any other day’. Whatever the conditions for hearing the message of Christianity may be, it is clear that they were not satisfied two hundred years ago, came to be satisfied in the nineteenth century, and have ceased to be so well satisfied now. The problem of course is whether they can ever be satisfied again.