This book is about the eighteenth century, which Robert Ingram describes as a ‘late chapter in England's long Reformation’. It has become de rigueur to seek to bury ‘the Enlightenment’ as a term to denote that century. We might avoid the term because we think that the concept of ‘Enlightenment’ (even John Pocock's ‘conservative clerical Enlightenment’) is too burdened by anachronism to be of much explanatory use. But increasingly Enlightenment-denial has come to have a more militant edge, for eighteenth-century history is part of our culture war of religion against secularism. Ingram dates his acknowledgements to the ‘Feast of Blessed Anthony Turner’, a Jesuit martyr executed during the Popish Plot, and, in his conclusion, he gives pride of place to the Anglo-Catholic historian and theologian J. N. Figgis. His bêtes noires are Anthony Pagden and Jonathan Israel, whose vision of the Enlightenment is of the relentless rise to supremacy of atheistical, secular, materialist values. Against them, the message is that God survived the Enlightenment.

I do not mean to imply that ‘militancy’ undermines Ingram's scholarship. On the contrary, commitment is a great sponsor of fine scholarship. His book is rich, sophisticated, finessed and fine-grained. Its domain is the interconnection of theology, ecclesiology and politics; and, in turn, of patristics, biblical hermeneutics, philosophical theology and English ecclesiastical history, as the stamping grounds of Hanoverian clerical intellectuals. The four case studies are of Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. These figures had immense prominence in their time; and they are chosen precisely as not being, say, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume or Gibbon. The limitation to four case studies scarcely constrains what is a capacious book, because it allows for consideration of the enemies who crossed their paths, such as Mathew Tindal, Samuel Clarke, Benjamin Hoadly or, among Dissenters, Daniel Neal, in his History of the Puritans. Although Tindal is here, the Deists are downplayed (again in reaction to a stream of recent studies of them), for the argument is that the Deists were intellectually outgunned. Ingram's case studies allow for subtle expositions of some very diverse writings, whether Middleton's Life of Cicero, Grey's Examination of the fourteenth chapter of Sir Isaac Newton's Observations on the prophecies of Daniel, Warburton's Divine legation of Moses, or Waterland's Advice to young students. Among the book's themes are the heavy weight of historical memory, particularly the Church's traumas of the seventeenth century (especially as recounted in Clarendon's History of the Rebellion); the ways in which the curriculum shaped the mental equipage of the clerical mind; and the impossibility of finding a satisfactory middle way between a Catholic doctrine of the autonomy of the Church and the inevitable constraints, political and intellectual, imposed by being a Church ‘Established’ by the state. Ingram is also alive to those dimensions of intellectual history which point to the conditions of textual production. Divinity sold well; the Gentleman's Magazine was full of it. Book subscription lists tell us much. Genres were diverse; they might be episcopal visitation charges, editions of classical texts or essayistic ‘polite’ journals, as well as formal treatises. The rhetorical conventions of the age still take us aback: the sheer ferocity of priestly polemic, its combination of ‘vitriol and eloquence’.

Ingram's book is amply informed by a command of recent secondary literature. It is enlivened by some fine aperçus. It rightly invokes those still-potent Victorian commentators, Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen. It reads its authors sympathetically, for all that, in the last resort, it shares the latter-day (Anglo-)Catholic indictment of eighteenth-century theology for being, on the one hand, too forensic, ‘rational’ and hyper-historicised – ‘decorated natural religion’; and, on the other, too erastian, for all its efforts to loosen the grip of the Whig state. Ingram goes where his authors take him, whether it be to Christology, Trinitarianism, sacramental theology, Donatism, Methodism and the debate on miracles – or Hudibrastic satire on Puritan clergy. There are very few blind spots. More might be wished for on intellectual relations between England and the Continent: the book is a little too hermetically English. Erastianism might have been more constructively handled without presuming that it collapsed into ‘Hobbism’: there was a vibrant Anglican, non-Hobbesian, discourse on ‘civil religion’, which was the Hanoverian version of the Reformation's civil supremacy of the godly prince. And although there is a nice remark that the protagonists ‘used Renaissance tools to solve Reformation problems’, more might have been said about developments in the textual criticism of the Bible. Yet this is a highly successful book, and essential reading on the mental universe of eighteenth-century English divines. As such, it bears comparison with the work of other fine scholars – I think of Isabel Rivers and Brian Young – on the eighteenth-century's clerical ‘public intellectuals’.