This book finds no place for Thomas Hobbes. Yet for all his disapprobation of clerical thought and deed, Hobbes stood – fleetingly – on common ground with the Westminster divines. Famously, he poured scorn on the pretence of perception of God's ‘supernatural’ and ‘immediate’ speech, and remarked on the self-deceiving conceits of the ardently and arrogantly godly. By the time that Hobbes's Leviathan had appeared, Presbyterians had honed the art of flaying their credulous and overly perceptive Independent opponents. Heresy and schism were born of enthusiasm, of claims to direct inspiration from a voluble deity, of wrongful apprehensions of immediate revelation. Hobbes was not persuaded: a man might say that God spoke to him in a dream, but this was no more than to say that ‘he hath dreamt that God spake to him’. With this, the Westminster divines would readily concur, but their world – ‘cessationist’ though it was, and pretty much unanimously so, as Garnet Milne shows – was too full of intervening agencies to allow them to stop there. The unHobbesian rider might follow that Satan or some other wicked angel had confected the misapprehension of God's immediate communication. And this points to the challenge that Milne faced: how are we to credit the cessationist position of the Westminster Confession of Faith – the view that God's ‘former ways’ of revealing his will are ‘now ceased’ – in the context of persisting belief in a vibrant and even strife-riven world of spiritual presences, of interpretable providential occurrences, of messages fielded via dream or vision concerning personal duty and national welfare, of men and women in the here and now who appear blessed with prophetic abilities? Milne acknowledges that contemporary debate among Reformed Christians delivered an occasion for his research, but the result is a fine and learned piece of historical scholarship. Milne's principal points of focus are the sermons and treatises of the Westminster divines, although he occasionally turns to sympathetic non-attendees of the assembly, such as John Owen and Richard Baxter (curiously, no use is made of William Lamont's important studies of Baxter), and to various voices of a determinedly contra-Westminster commitment. Milne finds the assembly attendees, almost to a man, to have occupied cessationist territory, and to have protected their ground with sophisticated defensive and offensive armaments. The few – notably, the Englishman William Bridge and the Scot George Gillespie – who inclined towards a ‘continuationist’ stance speak in muffled tones, make their way haltingly and, with tell-tale qualifications, present themselves as case studies in ambiguity. The solid majority view is that God no longer intervenes miraculously, no longer dispenses immediate or special blessings of extra-biblical prophecy and doctrinal revelation. Rather, God's mind is mediated to humanity via the Word. Scripture, now, is the source and the benchmark, in the understanding and application of which the Spirit provides assistance. A dream or a foretelling or an angelic ‘motion’ must now be controlled by a biblical standard. God might retain ‘surprising and extraordinary’ modalities of communication, but for ‘every providence’, Milne concludes, Westminster theology would have ‘a concurrent Scripture principle or text to speak to it’ (p. 289).