Geoffrey Cantor asserts that, in discussing the Great Exhibition, ‘historians have generally ignored religion and instead emphasized its secularity and modernity’ (p. 204). If the first part of this assessment is an exaggeration, the second part is undoubtedly true. This well-researched and welcome book redresses the balance. Cantor would put the matter more neutrally, but it is well to be reminded that polite Victorian society drenched itself in sanctimonious religiosity. Similarly, its most prominent clerics fought like alley-cats over what, in a more secular age, seem like wearisomely trivial points of doctrine. The Great Exhibition, of course, was held during the year that the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, Anglicanism's peevish and intolerant reaction to Pius ix's re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in Britain, reached the statute book; with it, splenetic religious prejudice reached its nineteenth-century apogée. Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that the religious dimension of the Exhibition loomed larger than most historians have previously noticed. It was Prince Albert's influence that ensured that the official Exhibition Catalogue's title page included Psalm xxiv.1: ‘The Earth is the Lord's, and all that therein is: The compass of the world and they that dwell therein.’ How did the various religious sects react to the message and significance of the Great Exhibition? Cantor's well-researched and judicious volume is a reliable guide. Some of his conclusions are unsurprising. Broadly, the High-Church elements in the Church of England were less enthusiastic about it than were either its Broad-Church or Evangelical wings. The diverse and rapidly growing Nonconformist communities were naturally keener to praise the ingenuity and resource of manufacturers and traders as examples of ‘Protestant progress’ than was the Roman Catholic community. Cantor, however, shows that such easy generalisations tell less than half the tale. His detailed research concentrates mostly on denominational periodicals, the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Religious Tract Society and a mass of contemporary pamphlets, many of which had been gathering dust since 1851. He explains how, and why, the Wesleyans and Baptists were less enthusiastic about the Exhibition than was the Congregational community. The Tablet might assert that the Exhibition had – apparently with malice aforethought – marginalised Roman Catholics: ‘We are not objects of love, but hatred; we are to suffer while others rejoice’ (p. 147). Other Catholic commentators, however, welcomed the opportunities for constructive integration which it presented to exhibitors and tourists alike. No one better encapsulated the ambivalence of response than the factory-reforming Evangelical Anglican, the seventh earl of Shaftesbury. On visiting the Exhibition soon after it opened in May 1851, he noted that most visitors had been ‘carried away by their impulses’. It encouraged people to judge humanity on ‘intellectual, scientific and material advancement’ rather than on moral criteria (p. 138). A visit in September modified Shaftesbury's view. The Exhibition was ‘wonderful’ in itself. But Shaftesbury ‘at one moment’ regarded it as a mere ‘triumph of Materialism’ while, at another, he saw it as ‘a type of the Millennium, when “all kindreds and tongues, and nations” shall flow together to the Holy City, in peace and worship, to hear and see the wonderful works of God’ (p.198). Unsurprisingly, atheists and free-thinkers mostly reacted with unambiguous enthusiasm to the unprecedentedly extensive evidence of the rational ingenuity of mankind. But they were a tiny, unrepresentative, minority. For most who attended the Great Exhibition, we can be fairly sure that thoughts of divine providence went hand in conflicted hand with those of material progress.