The common reader may feel inclined to lay the same embargo on his writers as the Duke in the Elizabethan tragedy on his courtiers. Great tact, and a sustained intellectual animation to balance the much that is repulsive in the theme, were needed to make a very long book about it as attractive, as well as instructive, as this one is. It is a study of birth as well as death, and among what it shows perishing, besides human victims deserving or undeserving of their fate, are gangrened beliefs and ossified customs, leaving room for a fresher air to blow in. Though an ecclesiastical historian and an Anglican canon, its author treats his anything but lively subject in a lively fashion that helps to dispel its glooms. 'The stolid battalions of the theologians and the irresponsible cavalry of hell-fire preachers and menacing apologists who skirmished on their flanks', and their opponents, the philosophes and the esprits forts who were prepared to die without the Church's aid, are treated with equal tolerance and insight.

LRB 15 April 1982 | PDF Download