Although the title suggests that this is a biography of a person in the ‘revolutionary age’, it is really a study in contrasts; these contrasts are personified by two radical exponents of drastically different religious beliefs and world views: Jacob Green (1721–90) was raised in Malden, Massachusetts, studied at Harvard, and became a Presbyterian minister in Hanover, a small town in New Jersey. Thomas Bradbury Chandler (1726–90) on the other hand, born too of congregational parents, was the son of a wealthy family, studied at Yale, converted to Anglicanism, and accepted a call by the Anglican congregation at Elizabeth Town, New Jersey. While Green began to advocate a Calvinism that stressed religious voluntarism as well as the need of the truly believing to live up to the high ideals set by him, Chandler advocated high Anglicanism and was one of the most ardent defenders of the idea that an Anglican bishop should be settled in the British colonies in North America. While Green rejected centralising tendencies within the Presbyterian Church and envisoned a congregation run by the truly converted and elect in order to ‘purify the church’, Chandler preached the tenets of an Anglican state Church that reflected the social gradations of English society. In hindsight it is clear who lost: in 1775 Chandler was forced into exile, while Green, author of the acclaimed pamphlet Observations on the reconciliation of Great Britain (1776), in spring 1776 propagated independence from Great Britain, saw in the War for Independence a means to promote his goal of purifying the Church from the sins that he so eloquently described in his pamphlet A vision from hell (1770), and in addition to his many functions as a farmer, pastor, miller and physician entered politics and played a significant role in New Jersey's political and constitutional history.

This is a fine study that profits much from its design as a study in contrast of two radicals; its intelligent structure sharpens the author's analysis of the nature of opposed religious believers, social concepts and political views. I do have, however, one major problem: Rohrer puts too much emphasis on the supposedly ‘democratic’ notions of Green's concepts and ignores the fact that his religious concept of purifying the Church was based on his concept of the covenanted few as the religious elite of the true congregation.