How does the historian capture a living breathing body of theology and piety, especially when it was going through a period of reassessment and adjustment? This has been a problem for scholars of later seventeenth-century Calvinism as it faced ‘the experience of defeat’ and began to lose its way. The renowned scholar of early modern English Calvinism, Dewey D. Wallace, has risen to this challenge with a series of intellectual portraits of a remarkable set of characters from the later seventeenth-century Reformed tradition. The resulting book is a humane, wise and informative account not just of these individuals and important (if neglected) topics such as ‘ancient theology’ and Platonism, but also of the way in which their theological tradition was evolving in the years between the Restoration and the reign of Queen Anne. This book's subtitle reveals Wallace's strong sense that during these decades the Reformed sensibility was finding different modes of expression, engaging with currents of thought that had long been considered inimical to its scriptural and Hebraic outlook, and yet holding fast to a central ‘core’ which he defines as ‘the mystery of grace’. The persistence of this understanding of divine grace as the supernatural, renewing, irresistible means of individual salvation is what unites the writings of the mystic Peter Sterry, the ancient theologian Theophilus Gale, the pastor Joseph Alleine, the controversialist John Edwards and the treatments of natural theology by Richard Baxter, John Howe and William Bates. A chapter is devoted to each of the first four authors, another to the three writers on natural theology, and another to an assured sketch of the later seventeenth-century intellectual landscape. These are substantial discussions, packed with lucid exposition and commentary: John Edwards gets a sympathetic hearing which makes this chapter an excellent starting point for further study of that cranky, marginal, but fascinating figure; the chapter on Alleine's posthumous ‘re-packaging’ as a ‘Calvinist saint’ of a distinctly Baxterian kind is persuasive in its reconstruction of the process and revealing about the Evangelical Calvinism which it served. As one might expect, Wallace's knowledge of the Puritan tradition allows him to draw comparisons between the generations and his broad sympathies mean that he can identify those areas where the godly and the churchgoer might find themselves in agreement. Perceptive, even-handed, but not detached, Wallace is an excellent guide to these authors and preachers. He has distilled many thousands of pages of seventeenth-century preaching, controversy and devotional writing into a valuable account. He spends less time on showing precisely how these authors shaped later Calvinism – the Alleine chapter is perhaps the strongest on that theme – but he certainly shows that what Gerald Cragg called ‘the eclipse of Calvinism’ in the later seventeenth century is very far from the whole story.