William Haller argued in 1938 that there could not be a proper history of the English Revolution until we had decent biographies of the second-ranking Puritans at its heart. Two he had in mind were William Prynne and his enemy, John Goodwin. We have had to wait until 2006 for John Coffey to give us the definitive Goodwin. Already in his first book he had given us the definitive Rutherford – a very different sort of Puritan – and the merits of one study carry forward to the second. First is a beautifully lucid prose style, which makes even the prolix theological debates communicable to the general reader. Second, he never loses sight of the bigger political picture. Third, he is very good on Goodwin's university networking contacts (drawing, with acknowledgement, on Francis Bremer's researches). Fourth, he is good at showing how events alter ideologies. In the 1630s Goodwin might scorn the claims to lead a church of the cobbler Samuel How, but in the 1640s he allowed Richard Price and Daniel Taylor to deputise for him in the pulpit. Walwyn noted the inconsistency. The 1640s were full of vitriolic controversies, but it sometimes seemed that the worst that could be said of Goodwin (and inevitably it was by Thomas Edwards in his Gangraena), was that he had played bowls on a fast day. Ann Hughes has wittily suggested that an unintended consequence of this association was the practice of the Victorian evangelist, C. H. Spurgeon, to press visitors to join him in ‘the old Puritan game of bowls’. Not least of Coffey's services to scholarship is in the fiendishly difficult task of attributions of authorship. He has read everything by, and about, Goodwin, and is the ideal person to take it on. May I draw his attention to one missing crumb? The Huntington Library has a pamphlet by John Owen against Goodwin which had belonged to an eighteenth-century Welsh Baptist, Richard Leggett, who has covered it with his personal observations. He deplored in Wesley what Owen deplored in Goodwin: ‘the dread and terror of that Iron rod, of vengeance and Hell’. Baxter, on the other hand, deplored the ‘marrow’ theology of Edward Fisher in 1645 precisely because it ‘presseth believers not to look to their sins as making them lyable to God's everlasting wrath and Hell fire’. Coleridge saw why Arminian Puritans like his own beloved Baxter, and Goodwin and Wesley, were attracted to the sanction of eternal hell-fire to keep the individual up to the mark, which would lead him to the paradoxical insight that Calvinism might be the lamb in the wolf's skin but that Arminianism was the wolf in the sheep's skin.