Christology, according to Alan Sell, has been the chief doctrinal occasion of secessions within Protestant Dissent in England and Wales. Mainstream Dissenting views in the seventeenth century were in line with Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but already at that time there were hints of divergence on the fringes of the movement. During the eighteenth century, as Presbyterians increasingly became Arian and some moved into Socinianism, the orthodox often changed their allegiance to Congregationalism. There was much less transfer during the nineteenth century and by the twentieth Nonconformist thought was generating weighty reflection rather than ardent fissiparity. Since 1950 the theology has waned in quantity, with only a single work on the theme from a Nonconformist pen being worthy of mention, but there has also been a fresh Christological controversy, in the Baptist Union during 1971–2 over the opinions of Michael Taylor. Some of the chapters in this short but encyclopaedic survey do not convey a clear message, but the ample quotations give a vivid sense of what was at stake. The judgement that there was no significant original literary contribution to the discussion of the person of Christ in the first eight decades of the nineteenth century (p. 102) surely needs qualification to take account of John Pye Smith's The Scripture testimony to the messiah (1821), long a standard text on the shelves of Dissenting college libraries. There are, on the other hand, ingenious verdicts such as the labelling of some of the eighteenth-century Arians, who habitually appealed to the bare text of Scripture, as ‘proto-fundamentalists’ (p. 31). This is a work of great erudition that lays bare much of the complexity of the eighteenth-century divisions and something of the quality of the twentieth-century scholarship.