This monograph identifies a variety of ‘liberal historicism’ (p. 14) which did more to defend than to undermine religion in Victorian Britain. If history became ‘sovereign over God’ (p. 1) in Victorian historical thought, then the historicisation of Christianity preserved its centrality to ‘intellectual culture’ (p. 9). In chapters on the Victorian study of the Early Church, medieval Catholicism and the Reformation, Joshua Bennett traces a move from ‘static idealizations or deprecations of periods’ (p. 199), institutions or creeds towards an emphasis on the continuous development of Christianity, which reimagined traditions as ‘historically dynamic’ (p. 14). Although noting that John Henry Newman popularised the development of doctrine to justify his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Bennett identifies this shift with the decline of Evangelical and Tractarian historical scholarship and the rise of a liberal ‘Protestant mainstream’ (p. 2). Liberal Protestantism was a ‘shared intellectual space’ (p. 11) in which Anglicans, Presbyterian Scots and German Lutherans conversed across denominational and national boundaries. As Bennett concedes, and as James Kirby's work has superbly demonstrated, High Church historiography remained distinctive and important in the later nineteenth century, but he suggests that both it and Evangelical Anglican and Dissenting historical thought quietly assimilated the liberal emphasis on progressive continuities. Bennett teases apart two concurrent approaches to the liberal historicisation of Christianity. On the one hand, clergymen such as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Henry Hart Milman and Edwin Hatch sought to broaden the Church of England by exploring the degree to which external factors such as culture and race had always shaped what Christians believed. Bennett rightly follows Brian Young in seeing this enterprise as the literary and romantic continuation of a native latitudinarian tradition, which sought to subvert ahistorical ‘sectarianism’ (p. 24) or ‘doctrinalism’ (p. 115). On the other hand, idealist thinkers who found such an approach sceptical or careless focused less on unsettling orthodoxy than on tracing its ‘developing rationality’ (p. 90) through historical time. The Presbyterian Scots who dominated this tradition claimed that doctrines such as the Trinity were philosophically true and experientially satisfying as well as historically significant. Their extensive debts to German mediating theology and philosophical Idealism suggest the important finding that the impact of German religious thought in Britain was ultimately conservative and apologetic. Bennett's final chapter suggests that religious historicism promised not just to liberalise Christianity but to defend it against secularisation. By revisiting the intellectual history of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and incorporating it into narratives of spiritual progress rather than aberration or decline, liberal Protestants represented rationalism as a development internal to Protestantism, which would end in its ‘refinement’ rather than its ‘retirement’ (p. 214). Bennett's book is a consummate feat of erudition, which unearths neglected thinkers and texts and uses archival finds to mount fresh appraisals of familiar figures. Its prose is high and wry. Yet its bigger claims seem circular. It is surely unsurprising that the study of ecclesiastical history ‘within religious traditions’ (p. 11) attracted ‘religiously committed critics’ (p. 216) dismissive of agnostic or positivist approaches to the past. Though styled by Bennett as ‘public moralists’ (p. 12), many of his thinkers were ‘sequestered dons’, ‘comfortable clergy’ or ‘popular preachers’ (p. 5) whose published musings on history were more sermonic than academic. Small wonder for instance that in 1860 the Unitarian minister James Martineau should criticise Henry Buckle's sociological history for separating progress from ‘theological commitment’ – he did so in an address to a roomful of ‘intending ministers’ (p. 209). The book is thus more convincing in evoking the impact of historicism on religion than in proving that religion came to ‘structure wider understandings of the movement of history’ (p. 2). To demonstrate that churchy historicism managed to outweigh ‘pointedly secular’ (p. 17) approaches to religion in the past, such as sociology or anthropology (largely overlooked here), would require a fuller account of the institutional power and popular audience that its practitioners enjoyed. If religious historicism remained chained to the pulpit desk, then Bennett also concedes that the convictions that it defended were often too wispy to make it hegemonic. The Kulturprotestantismus of William Lecky may have led him to grant a ‘creative and continuing role to spirit’ (p. 212) in his histories, but did this amount to a vindication of religious belief? For George Eliot at least, his ‘fatiguing use of vague and shifting phrases’ (p. 213) suggested otherwise. If liberal historicists were then over confident to feel that they could steer historical research towards the ‘positive reconstruction’ rather than the ‘internal secularization’ (p. 245) of Christian faith, Bennett's book stands as a crisply written tribute to that confidence, with much to teach anyone interested in Victorian liberalism.