This book is a systematic exposition and critique of the writings of the first and second Professors of Philosophy at Reading University (De Burgh and Hodges), a Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at King's College, London and later Dean of St Paul's (Matthews), and a Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford (Quick). All four were conscious that the culture in which they were situated had long slipped its moorings from the Christian faith. Using their philosophical expertise they were concerned to bring that faith into a new, more positive intellectual relationship to that culture. United in rejecting both the old idealism (though traces of it remained in Matthews) and scientific positivism they argued for a broadly based understanding of the role of reason and its relation to the self-manifestation of God in Christ, who elicits from us the response of faith. All argued for an orthodox Christianity as a reasonable world-view, but Hodges was firmest in his view that in the end a decisive personal choice has to be made.

Sell is sympathetic and balanced in his elucidation of these four Anglicans, and his own judgements are judicious. He is able to draw on his deep knowledge of non-Anglican traditions to correct some of their views of these traditions and to show, in the case of Quick, that they are based on inadequate historical knowledge.

The culture of these four thinkers still liked to think of itself as displaying a ‘Christian Ethic’. But T. S. Eliot, who expressed the despair of so many in The Waste Land, came to the Christian faith and was baptized in 1927, not so much because of the kind of metaphysical inquiry with which these thinkers were concerned, but out of a desperate need to ground his highest ideals, in his case heroism and sanctity, in something that would hold. What he saw so clearly then, now presses on the mind of many more.