Expanding a hypothesis the author first developed in his earlier publications, this is an examination not merely of the extent to which ministers of the Church of Scotland, depending on their factional loyalties, sharply differed in the messages they sought to convey to their own congregations (and through the medium of print to the wider world) on a wide spectrum of contemporary issues, but also of how their own personalities impacted on their sermons, often revealing their innate political as well as their theological leanings. In a wide-ranging and thoughtful Introduction, Crawford argues...