Alexander Knox (1757–1831) is the ‘also man’ of studies in early nineteenth-century high churchmanship, a progenitor in some respects of the Oxford Movement, an apparent point of connection between the Tractarians and their Georgian forbears but, in essentials, an interesting but isolated Anglo-Irish layman. David McCready's book (a consolidation of his Trinity College, Dublin, doctoral disseration) is a brave attempt at moving Knox towards the centre-stage, using the Remains (1834/37) and his printed correspondence with Bishop John Jebb (1834), but drawing also on a range of archival material that helps to give a more rounded portrait of his subject. Knox certainly emerges as an interesting theologian in his own right and worthy of study but one whose distinctive, sometimes original cast of mind and detached position was likely to limit his influence in his own time and posthumously. And Knox knew what he was about: he resigned as one of Lord Castlereagh's secretarys in Dublin Castle in 1799, opting instead for a life of devout retirement and describing himself thereafter (with some exaggeration) as ‘a hermit’. Though McCready warns us ‘that Knox's ‘individualism should not be pressed too far’ (p. 45) it is hard not to conclude that the margins gave him scope for unfettered articulation of his views and best suited his temperament.

Knox had that regard for primitive antiquity, the Church Fathers and the 1549 Prayer Book that other contemporary high churchmen possessed. His originality lies elsewhere. In that regard McCready makes a strong case for Knox as a reviver of the Platonic tradition in Christianity, one that gave him that notion of human deification that was central to his mature theology. Knox's attempt to reconcile ‘heart religion’ with the rational, McCready plausibly contends, should be seen as a counterpart to Coleridge's efforts to do the same (though the two men never met). He also attempts a Knox-Schleiermacher comparison where the differences are much greater than the resemblances. These efforts (in chapter v) are made within a somewhat reductionist framework of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romantic’ categories.

This book is primarily an exposition of Knox's theology detailed thematically in chapters vi–xii. Knox was always looking to Scripture and the formularies of the Church of England (he was one of the first to use the term ‘Anglican’) as the basis of his generous Christian understanding while remaining a touch wary of dogma. For once diverging from his mentor John Wesley, Knox had a faith in human perfectability through grace, seeing justification by faith a part of a process leading to that desirable end. On baptism, Knox admitted the regenerative power of the sacrament while also emphasising the concomitant dimension of inward blessing made manifest in a life of holiness; on the eucharist, he looked as much to Bishop Ridley as the seventeenth-century divines and, while a virtualist, also taught eucharistic sacrifice. McCready looks in detail at the response of the early Tractarians to Knox (and strives hard in arguing for his impact on the development of their ideas) but the endorsement of any of them was always qualified in matters of detail. He was always a difficult fit: only four years after Knox's death, the Anglican Newman told Froude that Knox was a subjectivist.

Most roads, on McCready's theological reading of Knox, lead back to John Wesley. The latter was, he argues on the basis of the fifty letters Knox received from Wesley between 1775 and 1790, the determining and lifelong influence on Knox, who published two defences of Wesley (1789 and 1802) as well as a reply to Robert Southey in 1828. McCready's Wesley is a high churchman just as his follower, Alexander Knox, was a high churchman. McCready concedes that there were minor points of divergence between the two of them and, in a footnote (p. 61), that Wesley's high churchmanship was ‘idiosyncratic’ (just as was Knox's). On those grounds of personal solidarity, one can see how Knox was invariably prepared to depict Wesley's Methodist management and his relationship with the Church of England as much more consistent than many others viewed it. This influence of the older man on the younger during the 1780s and 1790s may be conceded but McCready's straining to find correspondence at most turns (he brings Wesley into virtually every chapter of the book) is both unpersuasive and even distortional.

Contexts are thin in this study and little space is given to Knox's life lived out in the Church of Ireland and his evolving relations over time with other members of the communion. He was in favour of Catholic Emancipation, hoping that internal reform within the Roman Church would open the way to reunion with the Anglican communion. This persuasion was not calculated to endear him to mainstream Irish Anglicans in the early nineteenth century and, along with his lack of interest in social issues, it also limited his influence with members of the Clapham Sect. The book is most valuable and successful in its demonstration of Knox's theology as both coherent and eclectic, where pneumatological influences were primary to living the Christian life. It was also an optimistic vision (McCready awkwardly deems this an aspect of the post-Enlightenment epoch when most Churches were in fact deprecating the upheavals of the recent Revolutionary era and apprehensive about what was coming next) confident in the divine care of the Church and of the place of Anglicanism in the fulfilment of all things. What David McCready does not quite do is to establish the consistency of Knox's thought, principally because of the insufficient space accorded to its evolution and the varying influences on it over time.