Colonial Presbyterianism is a multi-authored work covering a great range of topics in the early history of Presbyterians in North America. The authors are all adherents of one or another of the varieties of the Presbyterian faith, and the work is avowedly written with the goal of inspiring the contemporary Church in ‘a culture that desperately needs the gospel of Jesus Christ’. Such a committed approach has advantages and disadvantages for the historian. On the positive side, the authors take seriously certain theological and ecclesiological issues that secular writers have tended to dismiss as trivial, or as substitutes for other, more important, sociological or cultural matters. The careful attention paid to the very complex eighteenth-century motivations behind the compromise that was the Adopting Act (1729) and its aftermath is a good example. The key figures in the period all receive ample treatment – Francis Makemie, Jonathan Dickinson, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies and John Witherspoon – and some of the best scholars in the field are represented. The essays are uneven, however, and a few seem more concerned with spiritual inspiration than the nuances of historical interpretation. Nor are they always up-to-date on the latest research by those outside of the faith. How helpful it is to the historian, for example, to have it argued once again that the death of Jonathan Edwards in 1758 while serving as president of the College of New Jersey turned the Presbyterian Church away from the spirituality of its Edwardsean roots towards ‘a technical orthodoxy … practically divorced from the revivalism of his New Side predecessors’ (p. 25). Edwards lasted barely a month at the college. He had little connection with the Presbyterian Church before that time, and already the Church had developed a number of quite distinct, non-Edwardsean traditions.