This wholly delightful book, written in impeccable English by a German scholar who has held senior appointments in Celtic at the University of Aberdeen, is not only a pleasure to read, but is something of a wake-up call to British church historians. It is bound to be somewhat depressing to see how much high-grade church history has leaked off to America, and although the Scottish universities have done better than their English counterparts in hanging on to appointments in church history, it comes as something of a shock to find how long it is since they gave a full-dress treatment to Robertson Smith. Scottish neglect has given an opening to an excellent and welcome study by a German scholar. Without repeating Lord Dacre's old calumnies about ‘those torpid seminaries of the North’, it would have been nice had this been a native product. Robertson Smith's career falls into two main sections, his time as a minister of the Free Church which culminated in a celebrated heresy trial and his being deprived of his chair at the Free Church College in Aberdeen and after a period as an independent man of letters his late success as an academic dignitary in Cambridge and a luminary in a cosmopolitan world of semitic and oriental studies primarily based on Germany. All this before his early death at the age of forty-eight. Each period has a fascination of its own. Entering the Free Church ministry during the period of its intense efforts to create an alternative establishment on a voluntaryist basis, he inherited an intense version of the Scottish virtues of discipline and frugality which enabled him out of exiguous resources to create a scholarly career and support the education of his family. His misfortune, apart from being too clever for most of his colleagues, was to emerge when it was becoming clear that the Free Church, despite having made off with much of the fund-raising machinery of the old establishment and despite immense sacrifices, was not going to displace the old establishment, and that having expended immense polemical energy upon the Crown Rights of the Redeemer, and such matters, had not the mental energy left to appreciate how reasonable views of the Old Testament were affected by the rapid development of collateral studies of all kinds. If the Free Church was to be held together on the one front it could not afford disputes on the other; it could not in short afford Robertson Smith. English liberals in this plight tended to keep body and soul together by employment as civil service examiners; Smith's haven was the Encyclopaedia Britannica of which he ended up as editor and a substantial contributor. For a number of years the back-breaking labour of this job was compensated for by enabling Smith to develop his contacts in the world of German scholarship, and much of the book is taken up with his correspondence there, especially with the acid pen of Wellhausen who had himself moved voluntarily out of the theological faculty into philosophy. The author, now a professor of religious studies at Tübingen, brings a racy account of all this to a close by showing how the heavy emphasis of scholars in the next generation on the apocalyptic background to the ministry of Jesus undercut the progressive basis of Smith's views even before the First World War broke up the international comity of scholarship that Smith had enjoyed so much. I only noted one small error in this splendid book – Didsbury was a Methodist, not a Baptist College.