The Disruption of the Established Church of Scotland has been described as the most important event in Victorian Scotland. In investigating the consequence of that 1843 division historians have understandably focused on the developing fortunes of the two Churches initially involved, the Church of Scotland and the newly initiated Free Church of Scotland. This welcome addition to the historiography of post-Disruption Scotland by a young scholar has brought attention to bear on how the fissiparous history of Scottish Presbyterianism continued as much after the Disruption as it had in the century beforehand. Ryan Mallon does this in an important study of not just the Free Church, but also of the United Presbyterian Church (UPC). It is a correction to what is perhaps too often a binary history of nineteenth-century Scottish Presbyterianism into Established and Free Churches. The UPC was formed in 1847 from a consolidation of the Presbyterian secessions in the eighteenth century from the Established Church, and Mallon concentrates on the interaction between he UPC and Free Churches in the mid-Victorian decades. The author makes the case that their turbulent relationship was based on two very different understandings of Presbyterianism. During this period the Free Church continued to adhere to the national establishment principle, holding that the state should support a national Church but not interfere with it. In contrast, the UPC were always voluntarists, opposed to an established Church as contrary to religious liberty.

However, by the end of the period covered by this book these two formerly opposed denominations were beginning to explore a possible union. This turn-around in dissenting relations in Victorian Scotland is the principal focus of this book; an important work of research when it is understood that the two Churches accounted for approximately half of Scotland's church attenders in these decades.

Mallon places these ecclesiastical and religious developments within the wider context of Scottish society and politics as a reaction to the uncertainty of the mid-Victorian period created by the massive economic and pluralist social changes of those years. He explores the question as to how there could be a potential reconciliation between the establishment and voluntarist strands of Scottish Presbyterianism that had been so antagonistic for over a century? Mallon finds the key to this question in the slow shift within the Free Church away from the establishment principle towards a Church embracing unendowed voluntarism and a belief that it freed the Church for evangelism, unconstrained by erastianism. Mallon sees the Free Church of the later decades of the study as a ‘softer version of dissent’ because it still wanted to claim to be the true national Church of Scotland, with the UPC holding fast to more radical anti-establishmentarianism.

Among the reasons for this common ground opening up between the two dissenting Churches by 1863 that Mallon offers are a younger generation of clerical leaders divorced from the decade of conflict that prompted the Disruption. There was also the growing influence of voluntarism within the Free Church, and the mutual amelioration in both Churches of their adherence to the Westminster Confession of Faith. One particularly important aspect of the book is its addressing the contentious topic of the influence of anti-Catholicism in generating a growing Protestant unity in nineteenth-century Scotland. Mallon argues in favour of such an influence, and that it has a wider than ecclesiastical dimension in the political alliance between these two Churches and the Liberal party. This wider dimension of the growing alliance of the two dissenting Churches is further explored in their social activism, most particularly with respect to their support for a national education system. Their mutual position on education was a dimension of their common antipathy towards the hegemony of the Established Church.

Mallon argues that in these various ways a ‘common dissenting agenda’ was formed that ensured that post-Disruption Scotland continued to experience the effects of sectarianism and denominational conflict, both within and well beyond ecclesiastical communities. This growing agreement and level of commonality might be questioned given the ultimate failure of the union negotiations in 1873, and the long period until eventual reunion with the Church of Scotland in 1929. However, this is an important study that helps account for the emergence of more centripetal forces in previously centrifugal Scottish Presbyterianism. The book helps demarcate reasons why an increasingly pluralistic Scotland did not become even more divisive than it did in the nineteenth century.