This is a survey of the changes in the way that the Christian message was understood and represented from 1860 to 1910. In Victorian Britain religion was a matter of public doctrine. As a consequence, ‘the deeper and more consequential debates on matters touching on religion were no longer dominated by clerics and theologians’ (although these continued to be important), but by ‘lay sages’ and the leading secular journals of the day, such as the Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century. From John S. Mill, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin to William Temple, James McCosh and James Martineau, all the Victorian public moralists engaged with issues such as the impact of geology and biology on the interpretation of the Bible, as well as broader and more conventional Christian questions, such as Providence and human responsibility. From the late 1850s these discussions prepared the ground for the impact of German higher criticism, from which, Livingston argues, British theology had until then been sheltered by its own provincialism. Two major themes dominate Religious thought: ‘God and the world’, including the questions of design and miracles, and ‘Humanity's place in nature’, including the foundation of morals and the doctrines of the Fall and sin. This book's starting point lies in the years 1859–61, which saw the publication of crucial works by Charles Darwin, J. W. Colenso and T. H. Huxley. Livingston follows the ensuing debate to 1910, when the discussion was further polarised by the publication of George Tyrrell's Christianity at the crossroads. Throughout this period British Christianity was forced to forsake its ‘insularism’ (p. 7) and engage with the continental European, German-dominated, debate on the foundations of theology. What is remarkable is that such British ‘insularity’ had included not only the United Kingdom and the crown dependencies overseas – such as Australia – but also the USA. Thus the debate examined by Livingston took place, to a large extent, between the Anglophone world as a whole and Germany, a debate which the Germans and their followers won easily thanks to the devastating impact of British natural sciences on the ‘common sense’ assumptions of traditional Christianity. Although Religious thought is based on a wide range of secondary sources, surprisingly Livingston makes no reference to a number of key texts which have reshaped our understanding of various aspects of the subject over the past thirty years. For example, there is no discussion of Boyd Hilton's work on the shift from an emphasis on the atonement to a focus on incarnation after 1865 (although Livingston reaches similar conclusions). Nor is there any engagement with the works of David Bebbington on Evangelicalism, or of Tim Larsen on the ‘crisis of doubt’, which, in the central decades of the century, reversed the ‘crisis of faith’ previously experienced by many Victorian intellectuals. Equally surprising is the lack of references to the work of Mark Noll, in particular his crucial analysis of ‘America's God’. These omissions are only partly explicable in terms of Livingston's emphasis on surveying the printed primary sources. Granted that this was the book's strategy and its appeal to students, it would nevertheless have been useful to highlight the main recent trends in Anglo-American scholarship on the subject. This could have been done, without interfering too much with the book's structure, in a substantial introductory essay. Despite this, Religious thought is a user-friendly survey which students and their lecturers will welcome. It is a pleasure to read and is also eminently usable as a reference book.