Ralph Stevens's deeply researched Protestant Pluralism is a tour de force of deft analysis and lively exposition. It surpasses all previous accounts of the major subjects it touches, illuminating several formative episodes in the development of the post-1689 Church of England. If every work of history were written like this, a reviewer's task would be much easier.

Protestant Pluralism explores the controversies provoked by the implementation of the English Toleration Act of 1689, including the prolonged struggle over how far the Act should extend. In a series of revealing case studies, Stevens shows how nonconformists pressed for an expansive reading of the Act's ambiguities, while a defensive-minded group of Anglican clergymen, reinforced by a deep bench of parliamentary allies, attempted to close the loopholes. The Act did not clearly specify, for instance, whether nonconformist ministers were authorized to perform baptisms, or whether dissenters could establish their own schools and academies. In an especially well-wrought chapter, Stevens tells the unexpectedly gripping story of chapels of ease and the efforts of determined dissenters to wrest control of them from the Church of England. He concludes by making a plausible case for 1714 as a turning point in ecclesiastical politics, after which the furor over the Act abated considerably. He attributes the ebbing of this tide to King George I and Bishop Edmund Gibson's joint campaign to suppress disputes among Protestants, coupled with the demographic waning of nonconformity. The settling of old discontents paved the way for the familiar paeans to the Act's prudence and liberality that were a staple of Anglican rhetoric under the Hanoverians. Stevens's work thus fits neatly into J. H. Plumb's influential account of the rise of political stability after the Hanoverian accession, The Origins of Political Stability, England, 1675–1725 (1967).

Stevens's book pivots around a series of debates within the Church of England about how to respond to the newly legalized and emboldened nonconformist clergy after 1689. He outlines a “fundamental disagreement over pastoral strategy” (31) that pitted two clerical factions against each other: a group of “moderates” who believed that extending an olive branch to nonconformists might persuade them to rejoin the true church, and a group of “conservatives” who resisted any attempt to normalize dissent. In adopting this terminology, Stevens eschews the conventional labels “Low” and “High Church,” which he sees as overly grounded in party politics (#). He is careful not to depict the moderate clergy as merely the Whig party at prayer, highlighting their desire to convert nonconformists rather than merely to form political alliances with them. He is also keen to rescue the conservative hardliners from charges of mere bigotry, suggesting that their polemics, though harsh at times, were aimed at saving the dissenters from eternal damnation.

While Stevens's empathy with his subjects is laudable, he sometimes discounts evidence that clergymen could be less than saintly. Consider, for instance, his discussion of the fraught question of occasional conformity. Some of the more moderate nonconformists occasionally took the Anglican sacrament of communion in order to qualify for public office under the terms of the Test and Corporation Acts. The more moderate Anglicans were willing to countenance this practice, seeing it as a means of encouraging dissenters to return to the fold, while the conservatives decried it as a profanation of the altar and an incitement to schism. Stevens characterizes the position held by the conservatives, somewhat blandly, as the “opposing pastoral view” (46), effectively offering them the benefit of the doubt. Their opposition to occasional conformity, in this reading, becomes a humanitarian effort to draw nonconformists away from the perilous sin of schism, while other possible motives, such as the desire to punish and ostracize, are not explored as fully. But it is worth noting how far the conservatives had strayed from the usual Augustinian defenses of religious coercion, which typically foregrounded the salvific benefits of persecution in obliging heretics to attend to Christ's word, relying on a literal reading of Luke 14:23: “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in.” The conservatives were hardly functioning as classic Augustinians at this point: their strident campaign of denunciation, far from compelling the dissenters to come in, amounted to barring the gates of the church. The moderate Elizabeth Burnet spoke for many when she condemned the conservatives for “[provoking] the Dissenters never to come within a church again” (quoted at 46). Not every clerical impulse is a pastoral one.

The implications of this study are far-reaching. If the Toleration Act was so divisive in the generation after 1689, then we might well wonder whether a broad upswell of tolerant feeling could possibly have carried it to its passage. It might more plausibly be described as a government initiative aimed at welding the nonconformists to the new Williamite regime at a time when counterrevolution seemed a frighteningly real prospect. For some Anglicans, the Act represented a necessary evolution to a new ecclesiastical order; for others, it was an unwelcome innovation that should be subjected to the sharpest possible limits. In charting the feuds over the meaning of the Toleration Act, Stevens elucidates a dispute that fueled a quarter century of partisan rage.