One small candle is a seemingly straightforward description of the early history of Plymouth Colony. By centring his argument upon the congregation of believers associated with Scrooby and Plymouth, Francis Bremer synthesises the current scholarship on its early relationships with Massachusetts, addresses the extent to which religion, faith and doctrine percolated into the daily lives of the laity and, in the process, provides us with an important reassessment of Plymouth's historical significance.

Deliberately avoiding the use of the terms ‘Pilgrim’, ‘saint’ and ‘stranger’, Bremer's connections of lay leadership and congregational autonomy illustrate his sense of the commonalities among Puritans and reveals the originality of his contribution to the historiography of Plymouth Colony. He argues that George Willison's use of the terms in Saints and strangers (1945) misread William Bradford's observations on the eve of the departure of the Mayflower. In Bremer's identification of the origins of the colony and composition of the emigrants, he offers a reading of Bradford's Of Plimoth plantation that largely dismisses significant distinctions and points to more fundamental agreement on religious matters.

The heart of One small candle is Bremer's argument that Plymouth's congregational polity was shaped by the practical adaptations of the laity to questions of church formation that subsequently influenced Massachusetts Bay and then was carried to England during the Civil War. Plymouth's congregational polity, according to Bremer, grew out of religious conversations shaped by the unifying experience of the people who left Scrooby for Plymouth, was affirmed by the application of lay beliefs to church structures and reified into a doctrine of congregational autonomy. Remnants of the congregation left behind in Leiden had prevented John Robinson's departure for New England, leaving Plymouth without trained clergy and requiring that it to be guided in its religious instruction by lay leadership. In so doing, the settlement's susceptibility to the inherent instability of lay deliberations on questions of faith and doctrine had to be resolved within the laity and resulted in New England's unique sense of congregational autonomy. William Brewster's conduct of meetings in his home could not substitute for the administration of even Puritans’ stripped-down versions of the sacraments. For example, while some might have been willing to allow lay baptism, the means for its performance came to depend upon Brewster's willingness to accept a call to the post of teacher by the congregation. When he declined, it meant the disastrous substitution of John Lyford, an appointee of the distant merchant adventurers of the New Plymouth Company and though a trained cleric, one whose Anglican ordination made him immediately suspect. Lyford proved an especially poor choice. Accused of sowing division, he held services according to his ‘episcopal calling’, and generally proffered views on communion incompatible with those of his Plymouth congregation (p. 128).

Population growth, geographic expansion and the settlement of nearby Massachusetts Bay led to Plymouth's congregationalist influence upon Puritan churches in New England. Bremer details how the Plymouth experience shaped the structure of other religious institutions. As in Leiden and during the first months of settlement especially, Plymouth's worship had revolved around a lay understanding of Scripture as supplemented by elders like Brewster, Bradford and Ralph Partridge, extensive personal, private libraries and discussions of faith through lay prophesying. These early accommodations spread as the colony expanded into new towns and neighbouring communities in Massachusetts Bay. Clerics who arrived in the Plymouth towns of Duxbury and Situate moved from their original non-separatism to positions of autonomy more consistent with their congregations. Early contacts with Massachusetts also spread Plymouth ideas about congregational autonomy. Sent by Bradford to care for Salem's sick in 1629, the deacon Samuel Fuller, in addition to using his medical training, led discussions on lay prophesying and church organisation. When Francis Higginson and Samuel Skelton, Salem's first minister and teacher respectively, assumed their posts, they found a church heavily influenced by Fuller, as evidenced by its later relationship to Roger Williams, in its sense of congregational independence.

Bremer explains the historiographic discounting of this influence as a product of later transatlantic debates over church structures that took place during the English Civil War. On the eve of the war, Bremer argues that the distinctions between separating Plymouth and non-separating Massachusetts congregationalism were quite slight, that Plymouth and Massachusetts Puritans generally agreed that higher authorities could not create local congregations and that the pronouncements of other clerics, synods and presbyters were simply advisory to individual churches. At the moment, however, when the reform of the Anglican Church seemed eminently feasible, English Puritanism began to harden into denominational identities that looked to Presbyterianism to control orthodoxy. Losing ground, dissenters coalesced around Congregationalists and Independents who resisted a hierarchical ecclesiology; to discredit them, Presbyterians impugned Congregationalists and Independents with the radicalism and separatism of a supposed and suspect New England Way. Defenders of congregational autonomy on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially those in New England, then qualified if not obscured the more extreme assertions of local independence. The responses in both Old and New England to Roger Williams, the Antinomian affair, the synod of 1647 and the subsequent treatment of Baptist and Quaker dissent, expressed worries about the potential disruption to religious homogeneity caused by an undisciplined laity leading to trimming the more extreme statements of congregational autonomy. The result of this shift allowed the cultural hegemony of a non-separating Massachusetts over Plymouth while obscuring the latter's original influence and was ultimately confirmed by the absorption of the latter into the Dominion of New England.

Some may take issue with Bremer's brief discussion of Native people or absence of the economic travails of the early settlers, but those subjects are for other books. Reflecting his capacious knowledge of early Puritanism, Bremer's narrative provides a subtle, engaging analysis that integrates Plymouth – too frequently dismissed by scholars as secondary, if not extraneous to Massachusetts or cloaked in the myths of national exceptionalism – into the larger transatlantic conversation, Puritan diaspora and the origins of the English New England.