This study seeks to address the question: what did Christians in the North think about emergent American capitalism between 1815 and 1860? Stewart Davenport provides useful answers but he is far from being the first scholar to tackle the question and much of this book covers familiar ground. His Christians are predominantly well-known clerics, drawn from what may broadly be described as the Protestant mainstream, although Methodists are ignored. Davenport first focuses on the writing of well-known clerical economists, academics who popularised the new ‘science’ of political economy through lectures and textbooks which drew heavily on the writings of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Malthus. Not surprisingly, these reverend professors enthusiastically welcomed and justified economic modernisation in the form of both mercantile and industrial capitalism. These men and their writings have been examined from many perspectives since the 1940s if not before by scholars whom Davenport acknowledges but rarely transcends. After these apologists for capitalism, Davenport turns to what he terms two ‘Christian economic contrarians’, Stephen Colwell and Orestes Brownson, who drew on their own experiences and the writing of European socialists to paint a pessimistic picture of industrial capitalism as the cause of gross inequalities. Like the clerical economists, Colwell and Brownson have been much studied. Colwell was a conservative Presbyterian industrialist, who nevertheless was critical of what he saw as an un-Christian social order. Brownson's pilgrimage from radical Protestantism and Christian socialism to Catholicism has long fascinated scholars and made him the subject of numerous studies, while Colwell, although less well-known, has attracted some scholarly attention. Again, Davenport's account of the ‘contrarians’ is generally clear and well balanced, but hardly original. In his final section, Davenport analyses the published sermons of a group of clerics he labels the ‘pastoral moralists’. These were Protestant clergymen, mostly Unitarians and Episcopalians, who generally welcomed the development of market capitalism but worried about its ethical and moral consequences, especially in time of crisis such as the severe economic depressions which periodically shook American society. These ‘moralists’ were concerned with familiar human failings such as greed and dishonesty and the way in which capitalism created old temptations in new guises. This section of the book is its most innovative but it is limited in value by the fact that the sermons analysed are drawn from such a narrow range of Protestant traditions. Davenport provides a sensible introduction to important themes in ante-bellum Protestant thought; his book may prove useful to a new generation of scholars but it has less to offer to those already familiar with the field.