This is an important and pioneering book, contributing significant new evidence about financing the Church of England and also about secularisation and women's roles. Using a case study of funding ‘home mission’ in London diocese, Sarah Flew has applied her professional skills in accounting and financial management to a functional analysis of successive bishops' strategic responses to their diocese's population growth of about 40,000 a year, producing what they described as ‘spiritual destitution’ amongst the poor. Traditional parochial strategies were overwhelmed, and episcopal initiatives in ‘home mission’, staffed by additional clergy and especially laity, including women, required new funds. Until 1914 Church of England dioceses lacked corporate financial structures and legal identities. The Bishop of London's Fund, the Lay Helpers' Association, the East London Church Fund, the Parochial Mission Women's Association, the London Diocesan Deaconess Institution and the Ladies' Diocesan Association were established, under the aegis of the bishop, and supported by leading laity and clergy from across the churchmanship spectrum, to raise and administer funds for ‘home mission’ amongst the poor. The latter three were largely for work amongst, and managed and funded by, women. Using annual reports, subscription lists and account books, Flew has investigated their fundraising strategies, analysed the demographic base of their subscribers and identified many of them, enabling her to trace trends in funding streams. For comparison she analysed the pan-Evangelical London City Mission's fundraising strategies and subscription lists. A few aristocratic owners of great London estates generously contributed throughout the period, but, from the 1870s, new generations of rich merchants and businessmen, apart from some Evangelical bankers and brewers, ceased to contribute to these funds. By 1900 the typical subscribers were women, giving small amounts. Flew points out that mid nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class churchmen still regarded themselves as stewards of God-given wealth, and subscribed to projects for their poorer neighbours as part of their Christian philanthropic duty. A new movement in the 1860s, focused by the Systematic Beneficence Society, and encouraged by bishops, promoted systematic and regular ‘stewardship’ by laypeople, including to ‘home mission’ projects. However, from the 1870s church fundraisers tended to adopt commercial models – large-scale bazaars, ‘sales of work’, concerts and dramatic performances. Although encouraging upper- and middle-class women to utilise and develop their managerial skills, Flew suggests that they, inadvertently, refocused fundraising for the salvation of the spiritually destitute from Christian philanthropic duty, to apparently leisure-orientated activities. New generations of rich business and professional men, no longer seeing themselves as stewards of God-given wealth, regarded their riches as theirs to spend as they pleased, on pleasurable activities – weekending, golf, lawn tennis, yachting – activities regularly denounced by incumbents of fashionable London churches for taking them away from church. Flew believes the Church of England's failure to gain the philanthropic commitment of younger rich men in the last quarter of the nineteenth century demonstrates that the Church was losing their allegiance. As Hugh McLeod suggested forty years ago, the Church not only lost the lower classes, but also the upper classes: here is the evidence to support the claim.