The research of Professor J. D. Roberts has interested me for several years. It has interested me because he has been working in a really rich area of intellectual history. Even before Professor Whitehead taught us to speak of the seventeenth century as the "century of genius," many of us looked with wonder on the creativity of the men who produced religious and philosophical literature in that period of contro­ versy and of power. It was, in a most unusual way, a flowering time of the human spirit. The present volume is devoted to one fascinating chapter in the history of ideas. We know now, far better than we knew a generation ago, how incendiary Puritan ideas really were. They had tremendous consequences, many of which continue to this day, in spite of the absurd caricature of Puritanism, which is popularly accepted. The best of Milton's contemporaries were great thinkers as well as great doers.

I. Benjamin Whichcote: A Man of Good-Nature.- II. From Athens to Cambridge.- III. Controversy with a Puritan.- IV. Religion of First-Inscription - The Candle of the Lord (i).- V. Religion of First-Inscription - Natural Ethics (ii).- VI. Religion of after-Revelation-Saving Knowledge (i).- VII. Religion of after-Revelation - Christian Morals (ii).- VIII. Religion of after-Revelation - The Universal Church (iii).- IX. The Father of the Christian Platonists of Cambridge.- X. Whichcote and the Intellectual Tradition.- XI. Epilegomena.- Selected Bibliography.