Bruce Hindmarsh, the holder of the James M. Houston Chair of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, has provided an account of the core of Evangelical faith in its earliest phase. Evangelical devotion, he says, was ‘a form of traditional Christian spirituality expressed under modern social conditions’ (p. 48). There is equal emphasis on the traditional and the modern. The legacy of the past is discussed in chapter iii, where Scripture, the Anglican formularies and Puritan, Reformation and earlier sources are acknowledged before the inclusion of more detailed case studies of the appropriation of Henry Scougal's seventeenth-century text The life of God in the soul of man and the fifteenth-century classic The imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. These sources were abridged and simplified, not least in John Wesley's fifty-volume Christian Library (1749–55), so that they made a deep impression on the rising Evangelical movement. Yet, as chapter ii has shown, the Hanoverian context was modernising, and Evangelicalism partook of the spirit of the age by adopting voluntary social organisation, high mobility, ecclesiastical experimentation and a stress on novelty. To expect salvation now was a striking innovation. Into this setting was injected the characteristic spiritual temper of the movement, illustrated in chapter i by the experience of George Whitefield, an amalgam of Oxford Methodist discipline, Pietist fearlessness in testimony, Nonconformist practical divinity and personal experience of the Holy Spirit. The outcome was a potent blend of the ancient and the modern.

The cultural context was not just modernising but also naturalising, a theme analysed in the second half of the book. By that term the author means that there was a shift away from the supernatural towards the natural. Perhaps that was most obvious in the sphere of natural science, to which two chapters, iv and v, are devoted. Most Evangelicals were Newtonians, though it is pointed out that Wesley held reservations about novel scientific epistemology. Wesley could nevertheless be incautious in scientific matters, publishing his medical self-help manual Primitive physic (1747) with the lethal advice that a good emetic was two drams of distilled verdigris when it should have specified two grains, one sixtieth of the printed dose. The passage in chapter iv about the cosmology of the American Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards that gave rise to his unusual brand of philosophical idealism is a striking example of the author's gift for succinct exposition of complex matters (pp. 133–4). A wide range of responses to the natural world is set out in chapter v, the common thread being that nature was a spur to devotion. Law, remarkably, is the subject of chapters vi and vii. The administration of justice interwove with themes dear to Evangelicals, who were able to point out that by the law of God all human beings were capital offenders. The relation of law to Gospel was central to Evangelical theology, so that preachers insisted that there were three possible human conditions: under the law of sin, under the law of conscience or under the law of the Spirit. The first was the natural state of mankind, the second the state of those awakened to their wickedness and the third the state of those who had received the pardon of the Almighty. The final substantive chapter, on art, is the most surprising. It is shown that contemporary schools of aesthetics, headed respectively by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, held conflicting views on painting. The divergence of Whitefield and Wesley within Evangelicalism is presented as an analogue, though by no means crudely. The two evangelists are not identified with the two artists, but Hindmarsh suggests that the Calvinists aligned with Whitefield admired the sublime while the followers of the Arminian Wesley made the motif of struggle central in their outlook. This observation is by no means implausible, for it coincides with the view of B. L. Manning in his brilliant study of The hymns of Wesley and Watts (1942), where the cosmic range of Watts's Calvinist verse is contrasted with the personal quest for salvation in the hymns of Charles Wesley. Contemporary art, as well as science and law, is shown to have affinities with Evangelical preoccupations.

Despite the vast range of themes covered in Hindmarsh's book, there is little to criticise. One portion that is a little doubtful is the treatment of natural law. It is said that natural law became more prominent during the eighteenth century (p. 178), whereas its decay at that time is a standard theme in histories of political thought. By the phrase, however, the author is referring to his organising theme of the rise of the ‘non-supernatural’, not the tradition of classical/Christian thought running down to the eighteenth century from the Stoics through Aquinas and the continuing scholastics of the post-Reformation period. That is a pity because a great desideratum is a study of the relationship of the thinking of the early Evangelicals to natural law in this sense. How far did they suppose that the light of nature, independent of the Bible, was a sanction for institutions and behaviour? That we do not find in this volume. Otherwise the only discernible flaw is a tendency to mis-spell British place names – ‘Sterling’ (p. 37), ‘Litchfield’ (p. 75), ‘Guilford’ (p. 173). What we possess in this book is therefore an extraordinarily rich account of the heartbeat of the Evangelical movement in its infancy. The engagement with recent scholarship in many fields of eighteenth-century studies is exemplary, but equally welcome is the concentration on spirituality, which enables the author to capture the movement's essence. In the conclusion Hindmarsh gently protests against the reductionism of E. P. Thompson's account of Methodist devotion. If readers want to understand what really motivated Evangelicals in the eighteenth century and even the early nineteenth century, they should turn to this book.