Do not be misled by the hagiographic sound of the short title—a quotation attributed to Jacob Wainwright, the African servant who brought David Livingstone's body back to England in 1872. Steven Maughan's Mighty England Do Good is an important and most scholarly contribution to the imperial history of Victorian religion as well as to the intellectual history of foreign missions. The intrinsic importance of its surprisingly neglected subject, the Church of England's multiple missionary organizations, is far from this study's only claim to attention. Maughan is a gifted intellectual historian whose exquisitely crafted narrative provides a welcome advance beyond the crude juxtaposition of sacred and profane that fueled past polemics. It is precisely by attending to ties that bind Anglican missions to the British Empire that Maughan succeeds in demonstrating “the power of religion and religious organization, as well as languages of faith, to convey meaning and spur action … in the ‘high imperial’ era” (xii).

The introductory chapter provides an invaluable map of a field whose considerable growth over the last couple of decades shows no sign of abating. Maughan is an informed and reliable guide through discussions of interest to imperial historians, historians of former colonies, women's historians, the cultural historians interested in gender and race, as well as historians of religion. Though interested primarily in missionaries' religious inspiration, he readily acknowledges the missionary movement's contribution to the exercise of colonial power and its reinforcement of the colonial rule of racial difference, however inadvertent or complicated by indigenous missionary agency. There were occasional exceptions and differences of degree. None were more implicated, however, than those connected to the Church of England. Its establishment virtually required Anglicans to articulate their faith in relation to the nation as well as to global Christianity. Maughan foregrounds rather than minimizing these entanglements, attending to competing configurations and change over time, and underscoring the particular ways in which foreign missions figured in a contested and contingent process.

The fact that religion mattered to historical actors is as far as many scholars go in taking religion seriously. We acknowledge that religion in the generic sense inspired missionary actions that contributed to tensions of empire. We have paid less attention to the tensions of religion. Maughan reminds us that God was in the details that divided our Victorian subjects. In their disputes, moreover, Maughan discerns religion's power not just to arouse intense emotion, but also to direct believers' actions in historically consequential ways. The missions of the Church of England provide an ideal vehicle for Maughan's demonstration of religious ideas in action. Its various missionary organizations carried conflicting messages, utilized different methods, and organized Christian communities in distinctive ways. Maughan carefully traces the intellectual genealogies of the church's disparate missionary initiatives, drawing attention throughout to their dialogic evolution. Maughan begins his story with the High Church Society for the Propagation of the Gospel challenging the pride of place in mission studies usually accorded the Church Missionary Society and by extension the Evangelical Revival. Rejecting the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel's emphasis on the geographical extension of the institutional Church, the Church Mission Society insisted on the priority of spreading the gospel message throughout an increasingly accessible world. Maughan suggests that the church as a whole benefited from disputes whose urgency underscored the church's intellectual vitality and religion's relevance in the face of modernism's challenge. Tensions between the church's High and Evangelical wings were exacerbated by a succession of religious revivals emanating from the ancient universities and from Keswick. Despite conflicting theological inspirations, these movements shared a tremendous enthusiasm for foreign missions, benefiting the Church Mission Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel as well as inspiring the creation of several more specialized organizations, such as the Universities Mission to Central Africa.

Navigating Maughan's painstakingly detailed narrative is no easy task. Readers that persist will profit from his often profound insights concerning the rapidly changing intellectual culture of late Victorian Britain. He documents the elusive process through which the interplay between conflicting ideas changes register; he attends to those moments when priorities get reconfigured for historically contingent reasons; and he acknowledges contradictory outcomes. Take for example the aforementioned revivals, which, according to Maughan, historians have either treated separately or attended to chiefly in terms of their polarizing effects. To be sure, the holiness movement did encourage Evangelicals' moralizing, anti-intellectual directions; meanwhile, the student movements reinforced Anglo-Catholicism from which many High churchmen recoiled; the coincidence of these things significantly widened the church's factional divide. According to Maughan, however, foreign missions exerted a countervailing influence. The centripetal forces described above opened up a middle ground from which the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Christian Missionary Society managed to moderate the divisive force behind the missionary enthusiasms they harnessed. The outcome was facilitated by dramatic changes in the missionary labor force. University students and, especially, single women increasingly displaced the “not quite gentlemen” who along with their wives had presided over the church's missions during the first half of the nineteenth century. These highly educated missionaries successfully pursued the professionalization of mission work that increasingly took the form of providing health, education, and welfare services. Religious disputes became less relevant to missionary operations. The empire, on the other hand, mattered more to missionaries whose social work drew them closer to the daily operations of colonial administration. Foreign missions were a flashpoint in the history of the Victorian church, sometimes inciting, sometimes reflecting, but eventually ameliorating the discord generated by the church's rival pieties.