Crawford M.Stevener: William Goode (1801–1868), Anti‐Tractarian Polemicist. London and New York: Routledge, 2025; pp. iv + 200.

Readers interested in major controversies of the mid-nineteenth century concerning Church of England doctrine and worship might or might not have come across the name of William Goode.At the time, he was an able polemicist on the Evangelical side, though perhaps not as well known as he should have been, and after his death, his importance was but rarely acknowledged.Church historians have not paid him much attention.The aim of this carefully researched book is to set the record straight, situating Goode in the centre of religious conflicts of the Victorian age and explaining his ideas and arguments in considerable detail.It is an interesting, well-organized, scholarly work that fills a gap in the relevant historiography, and even if the author rather labours his point that Tractarianism and High Churchmen have attracted many more researchers than have Low Churchmen and Evangelicalism, this book will be useful to all Church historians, whatever their specific topic of study.The son of a respected Evangelical cleric in London, Goode was educated at St. Paul's School, as were his brothers, and then Trinity College, Cambridge.He was ordained in 1825.He held a succession of livings in London, gaining friends and patrons along the way, briefly editing the Christian Observer, and emerging as a prolific and talented writer.In 1860, he was appointed dean of Ripon.For much of the time, personal and family circumstances were not comfortable.Indeed, in his ministry and as a husband and father there was hardship, especially early on, and he had lost his own father as a teenager.Dr. Stevener traces Goode's career-sympathetically-and explores the shaping of his theology in London and Cambridge, his appreciation of history and his rise in the Church, an institution he evidently loved.What comes through is Goode's enormous regard for Evangelical leaders of the preceding generation, his "legal mind," his consistency and of course his firm opposition to Tractarianism and Roman Catholicism.As Stevener puts it, Goode's position was not "innovative or radical but rooted in ecclesiastical history and governed by the legal formularies as established in the Reformation, under the authority of the English sovereign" (p. 7).In Chapters 2-5, there is discussion of Goode's involvement in four principal areas of controversy: prophesy, scripture, baptism and the eucharist.He was a stern commentator on "Irvingite" claims about supernatural spiritual gifts, marshalling a mass of material, some from very obscure writings, to demonstrate not only his own mastery of sources but also that historical evidence should matter more to the faithful than prophesy, tongues and speculative Christology.Goode's treatise of 1833, Modern Claims to the Possession of the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit, "signaled his arrival in the field of polemical theology" (p.48).Ten years later, Evangelicals were hailing him as a worthy champion in the face of what they took to be the Tractarian challenge to the Protestant history and identity of the Church.Goode upheld the doctrine and law gifted to his age by the Reformation and, most notably in Divine Rule of Faith and Practice (1842), criticized the Tractarians' concept of primitive tradition and the methods they used to interpret scripture.He continued to attack Tractarianism over the following years and took a keen interest in high-profile court proceedings that arose as certain teachings, ceremonies, vestments and church furnishings became matters of dispute.Probably the most important doctrinal disagreement was about baptismal regeneration, which was brought to the fore by the Gorham Judgment of 1850.