In this definitive study of one of the Protestant sects that emerged in the 1650s, William Lamont has written not only an absorbing piece of history but, more significantly, a book on how to do history. Using the Muggletonian archives (nearly ninety volumes of correspondence, treatises, religious verse and accounts) that were discovered in the 1970s and are lodged at the British Library, Lamont has rescued the Muggletonians from the quirky religious niche into which they were deposited by historians. Using (not without consideration) the ‘vertical’ analytical form favoured by historians of religious denominations, he layers each historical phase with context to reveal their motivation, message and proper place in English history; he also achieves affection and respect for his subject without partisan bias. The personal revelations of John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, the spiritual message to be inferred from the Restoration, the impact of toleration and ‘enlightenment’ and the ‘willed’ evolution of the original witness into modernity are all covered in meticulous detail. Lamont delves into the nature of their epiphanies; he examines the fine detail of their beliefs – from the existence of angels and heaven to the non-existence of hell (except as a subjective experience). From their origins until the death of the last Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, in 1979, Lamont analyses their demographics and geography, observes their meetings to commune and to share divine songs (set to popular tunes), and charts their constant balancing act between the two competing ‘seeds’ of faith and reason. In the process, Lamont answers the broader historical questions of all religious groups (institutional, theological and social) and the more awkward questions raised by the survival of the sect. How did it maintain its integrity – through leadership struggles and refinements to its guiding principles of materialism and mortalism – until the late twentieth century? How did it survive as an institution whilst shunning proselytising, prayer and ministry? How did it compare institutionally and theologically with fellow Dissenting sects, particularly the Quakers? And how did Muggletonians record and edit their own history? Whilst answering these questions, Lamont demonstrates a fundamental problem of historical evidence: how to reconcile the ‘truth’ of public voices and published words with the same writers' private musings and correspondence. In conclusion, Lamont challenges two fallacies about seventeenth-century religion: firstly, that seventeenth-century millennarians were inevitably revolutionary and, secondly, that Muggletonians were millennarian at all. They survived quietly but determinedly as ‘a freethinking debating society’ until more than three centuries of evolution brought them to a natural conclusion. But they maintained coherence to the last: Noakes could affirm that Muggletonians had been vindicated in their rejection of reason. It had, after all, produced the horrors of modern technological warfare. Examining their evolution, William Lamont has made the seventeenth century more accessible whilst showing how one group preserved its dissenting identity throughout a range of historical circumstances.