Bishop Gilbert Burnet, in his best-selling exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, first published in 1699, opined that as regards the theology of grace the Tudor founding fathers of the Church of England were ‘generally’ followers of St Augustine and exponents of unconditional predestination, albeit the sublapsarian variety. Not until the 1620s, in his view, was this doctrinal legacy effectively challenged, with the coming to power of the ‘Arminians’ and the consequent suppression of sublapsarianism, along with the more extreme supralapsarian teaching on the same subject. (The difference hinges on whether or not the Fall is presupposed.) Although Jay T. Collier does not cite Burnet, he evidently disagrees with this scenario. According to Collier the ‘rise of Arminianism’ is a matter of mistaken identity. In reality we are witnessing instead, so he claims, a disagreement among fellow ‘Augustinians’ about the doctrine of perseverance. Could members of the non-elect, despite their inevitable condemnation, persevere temporarily in grace and exhibit accompanying signs of sanctification? There was also a related debate about the effects of baptism. Granted, however, that such rival views did indeed exist among ‘Augustinians’ on the subject of perseverance, the elephant in the room here remains predestination. An obvious case in point is the treatment by Collier of the 1595 Lambeth Articles. He correctly points out that one of the modifications agreed to these articles, by Archbishop Whitgift, left open the possibility that the non-elect might persevere for a time. But what of those Collier whom himself dubs ‘semi-Pelagians’, namely William Barrett and Peter Baro, who were at the eye of the storm? How their views on predestination fit the argument of this book remains unexplained. More problematic still is the failure even to remark upon the forthright criticism of the Lambeth Articles, as containing ‘fatal opinions’, voiced later by Richard Montagu and his backers – including William Laud. Similarly, in enrolling Lancelot Andrewes among the ranks of the ‘Augustinians’, as opposed to the ‘Arminians avant la lettre’, Collier ignores the principal evidence, namely the two sermons preached by him in 1594 and 1599, concerning respectively the wife of Lot as an example of ‘imperseverant and relapsing righteous persons’ and Cain as the first of the reprobates. Taken together these sermons serve clearly to place Andrewes in the same camp as Baro, as an exponent of conditional predestination. In some ways an even more startling omission is any mention, let alone discussion, of Richard Thomson's Diatriba de amissione et intercissione gratiae et justificationis (Leiden 1616), the publication of which was arranged by John Overall via Hugo Grotius. (Thomson was a Cambridge theologian who died in 1613.) For the purposes of Collier's argument this work cries out for comparison with the De sanctorum perseverantia et apostasia (Leiden 1610), by the Dutch Arminian Petrus Bertius. What strikes one in this context is just how similar are the views of Thomson and Bertius on perseverance. Moreover, if the author of Debating perseverance is to be believed, the main objection by Montagu to the canons of the Synod of Dort (1619) was their effective denial that the non-elect might temporarily persevere. Yet in arguing his case Collier dismisses the published demonstration by Bishop George Carleton, in 1626, that Montagu was indeed an Arminian, while glossing away the latter's denial of the existence of an ‘irrespective decree’. As well as being an expert on the Dutch Arminian controversy, Carleton had headed the British delegation to Dort. Nor does Collier note that Montagu and his cheer leaders tended to equate the Dort canons with the Lambeth Articles as equally objectionable.

No use of manuscripts is made in this book and only a fairly limited range of primary printed sources are cited. One consequence is a large body of missing persons. As well as Archbishop Laud, they include Samuel Harsnett and Matthew Wren. It was Harsnett who in 1594 had launched a full-bloodied attack on the ‘goliath’ of predestination, while Wren in 1626 can be found characterising the Dort delegate Samuel Ward as ‘drunk’ with Augustinian wine. The book is also almost completely innocent of any political context. Thus there is no mention of either the proclamation of 1626 or the declaration of 1628, successive royal pronouncements which involved the silencing of what contemporaries now increasingly called ‘Calvinism’. (Use of this term makes good sense since the canons of Dort had enshrined sublapsarianism.) Although Collier devotes a penultimate chapter to a clutch of Puritan writers from the 1650s (Richard Baxter, John Goodwin, George Kendall and John Owen), his account of the teaching of the established Church ends without explanation in the allegedly still Arminian-free zone of the 1620s. He illustrates this proposition by way of a remark by Montagu that not until 1625 had he read Arminius as such but fails to note his subsequent conclusion that the Dutch theologian had ‘more in him than all the Netherlands’. Hence affinity of doctrine not the source is what matters, as Laud's first biographer Peter Heylyn, another absentee, was to note in 1660. On this basis a line of succession can be traced from the Greek patristic predecessors of Augustine, such as Chrysostom, and across the English Reformation. Moreover it was the tradition with which Bishop Burnet identified. (Among a host of others, the seventeenth-century pantheon of English Arminianism includes Thomas Jackson, Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor and George Bull.) From this point of view the temporary perseverance of the non-elect was an essentially cosmetic distinction, like sublapsarianism and hypothetical universalism, for the gates of heaven remained barred to all save those unconditionally predestined to salvation. There were also very important implications for understanding the role of the sacraments, especially the eucharist. Unfortunately, by treating perseverance in isolation from predestination, rather than bringing greater clarity to the questions at issue Jay Collier has served to sow further confusion.