For scholars interested in Muggletonians, William Lamont's new volume is a treasure. Publications on Muggletonians are scant, yet the Muggletonian Archive at the British Library is a fascinating and rich resource that Lamont exploits brilliantly. He uses a “vertical approach” to assess the sect, focusing on the sect's evolution over time rather than on a comparison to its contemporaries. With keen insight and subtle humor, he assesses the sect's leaders, theology, and tribulations from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Lamont deserves praise for his work, and his book deserves wide circulation.

That said, the book may disappoint readers who first meet Muggletonians in it pages. Despite being described as the “first ever total history of the Muggletonians” (xi), the book does not lay out in a systematic manner the sect's origins, beliefs, and practices. Rather, the reader encounters them piecemeal in various chapters, which are organized by time period. The introductory chapter describes the 1979 discovery of Muggletonian writings that had not been seen since the nineteenth century. Lamont quickly plunges into an assessment of how the sect evolved in response to challenges from Believers themselves. While this may leave Muggletonian aficionados breathless with delight, it likely will leave the novice bewildered. The book would have benefited from an initial chapter summarizing the sect's founding principles, and here I would point readers to Lamont, Barry Reay, and Christopher Hill's World of the Muggletonians (London, 1983).

Readers familiar with the sect's fundamental beliefs and practices, however, will be engaged by the thorny issues that Lamont addresses. In chapter 2 he explores the relationship between John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton—one of tension (Reeve's initial revelation told him that he was God's messenger and Muggleton was his “mouth”) as well as cooperation (both men were imprisoned for blasphemy in 1653). Lamont contends that, if the sect was to continue after Reeve's death in 1658, Muggleton had to modify the millenarian expectations that Reeve expressed in his 1652 Joyful News From Heaven and his 1656 A Divine Looking Glass.

Chapter 3 details the various ways in which Muggleton assured the sect's survival. First, he asserted his primacy as prophet over the usurper Lawrence Clarkson. Then, in his edition of Reeve's A Divine Looking Glass in 1661, he downplayed the imminence of the Second Coming, eliminated Reeve's defense of prayer, and excised Reeve's fulsome praise for Oliver Cromwell. His 1662 A True Interpretation of the Eleventh Chapter of the Revelation of St. John used Scripture to prove that he and Reeve were the Last Two Messengers sent by God.

In chapter 4, Lamont cites numerous letters, written to Believers between 1663 and 1671, that reveal how Muggleton bolstered his claim to be the sole prophet after Reeve's death, countered another challenge to his authority in 1670–71, and squelched millenarian expectations. Lamont shows that the letters crystallized the sect's basic tenets: immediate notice (“God taketh no notice” of prayer), mortalism, materialism, and a rejection of a literal understanding of the devil. Muggleton emerges as an ambitious man keen to preserve his status but also an engaging correspondent eager to discourse on topics mundane (marriage, love, trade, and taxes) as well as spiritual.

Chapter 5 explores issues that Believers debated after Muggleton's death in 1698: the practice of blessing and cursing; the doctrines of mortalism, materialism, and faith's superiority over reason; and literalism, witchcraft, free will, and immediate notice. They confirmed Muggleton's teachings that “men's fears of witches, dreams, devil and hell were as irrational as their hopes of an imminent 1000-year reign of the saints or that God would notice their prayers” (125).

But debate among Muggletonians persisted into the nineteenth century, especially over Muggleton's fidelity to Reeve's doctrine and over immediate notice. Declining numbers of Believers and an increased tendency to marry outside the sect seem to have exacerbated the debate. In chapter 6, which examines the sect from 1837 to 1901, Lamont distinguishes among Reevonians, Old Believers, and Modern Muggletonians, based on positions taken on these issues. Ultimately, he argues, a Modern Muggletonianism emerged that reaffirmed immediate notice, glossed over the differences between Reeve and Muggleton, and wrestled with the impact that current scientific discoveries had on the sect's teachings about, for example, the exact location of heaven or the height of God.

As Lamont shows in chapter 7, declining numbers led to the eventual death of the sect in the twentieth century. Yet, to the end, Muggletonians scoured the writings of their predecessors to find the truth about the sect's beliefs and practices. They continued to discuss cosmology, science, salvation, and predestination, and they continued to read and debate the prophets’ writings. Further, Lamont observes, they showed a strong interest in current events and attempted to reconcile them with Muggletonian teachings.

In his conclusion, Lamont argues against the common assertion that Muggletonians were millenarian. He contends that they never named an exact time for the Second Coming and never evangelized; further, although Reeve's earliest writings may have been millenarian, he denied a 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth, and the sect spurned literalist interpretations of scripture. Muggletonians had a “profound commitment to the Apocalypse,” Lamont argues, “but an equally profound detestation of radical millenarianism” (247).

Skillfully using Muggletonian writings to peer into the thoughts and feelings of “ordinary” Muggletonians as well as those of Reeve and Muggleton, Lamont shows that the sect wrestled with the same issues from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries: the end of the world, immediate notice, differences of opinion between Reeve and Muggleton, and correspondences with their contemporaries. He identifies the sect's openness to debate on such issues and its continuing commitment to collective self-examination as essential to its persistence for more than three hundred years. A future study could focus on these issues and then trace how Believers wrestled with them throughout the centuries.