The illustrations skilfully selected by Dominic Erdozain to accompany his text exquisitely encapsulate the theme that he pursues with penetrating pungency. We move from fairs and cockpits and gin-shops to dancing-rooms and the state-of-the art gymnasia available in Central London and Manchester, courtesy of the YMCA. However, this is far more than a narrative guide to shifting Victorian attractions. The author presents his book as an argument centred on soteriology. He sets out the proposition that it was the doctrine of salvation that propelled Evangelical Christianity into the British consciousness but it was its very ‘guardians’ in the Churches and Christian agencies of late Victorian Britain who brought about its gradual dismantling and dissipation. What he calls a this-worldly theology of salvation-by-recreation ‘occluded’ the classical and explicit soteriology of the ‘parent’ institutions. The chapters that follow illustrate the process as defined. Popular pleasure having been identified as the main rival, mid-century voices succumbed to the notion that the religious problems of the era were social and cultural and thus open to earthly remedies. ‘Sport’ was reinvented. The resulting muscular ‘godliness’ had little practical connection with Christianity. The paradox which emerges, and Erdozain relishes a good paradox when he sees one, is that ‘Muscular Christianity’ effectively separated the worlds of spirituality and sport in the act of trying to join them. In late-century, Evangelical individuals, notably R. W. Dale, are presented as struggling to ‘renegotiate’ Evangelical theology and contemporary social thought. The idea of ‘recreation’ was appropriated and, steadily, salvation was increasingly reduced to methods of avoiding the urban ‘vices’ present in some amplitude. The YMCA, with its various ‘facilities’, is seen as the enemy within (though that term is not specifically used). It was taken over by a philosophy of redemption-by-recreation. Holiness lost out. The highway to secularisation had thus been opened. Erdozain has been able to identify just a few pockets of resistance. A Baptist chapel in Clerkenwell did indeed run a ‘Christian cycling association’ but it seems that it was for the pleasure and health of the congregation and not – as it was elsewhere – instrumentalised for evangelism. Similarly the chapel eschewed the temptation to organise a temperance society. It is not quite clear, however, whether the members of the chapel did endow their decisions with the theological weight which the author accords them. A few other congregations are identified for their tenacity in resisting a ‘religious boom’ in which pleasure had so come to define the Christian mission until it was scarcely Christian. We are told, in conclusion, that Christianity may never regain its nineteenth-century centrality, but there can be clarity in isolation for what Erdozain argues religion to be. These points are strongly argued and obviously contribute to the never-ending reflection on ‘secularisation’ but there can perhaps be too much clarity. The transitions are undoubtedly there but the polarities conjured up by the concepts deployed, and the consequencies derived from them, seem to be too strongly stated.