Can an orthodox Christian creed and ritual be combined with a liberal church administration and a tolerant civic acceptance of not-so-orthodox views and practices? This question--perennial among Catholics for the past two centuries and the goal of the Anglican quest for a via media--finds an affirmative answer in Zdenek V. David's history of the Utraquist church of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bohemia.

This church declared its autonomy from the Roman church in 1415 after the Bohemian preacher Jan Hus, who had decried clerical abuses and opposed the pope's doctrinal and...