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Those who might consider America's God an old-fashioned work about a bygone era and might therefore pass Noll by will do so at their peril. Noll has often written on the state of the American soul and the evangelical mind in today's world, but here he restrains himself from developing overtly the still obvious ties between what went on between the 1730s and the 1860s on one hand, and today on the other. The reader who cannot see the connections and find the relevancies across the decades either has not read Noll carefully or has not looked around carefully at American political and religious expressions today. And scholars who do not appropriate this will not be able to write their parts of the American story as perceptively as they will if they have appropriated Nollian insights, whether to accept or reject them.

A word about the genre, nature, and achievement of the book is in place before we encounter Noll's well-grounded argument. His extensive endnotes include scores of references to his own earlier work, but such citations here are not the marks of a self-server. He simply has covered archival territory which most scholars like to pass by, and his essays and articles have been building blocks in this major edifice. He has read and distilled the writings of many New England divines who are, frankly, unbearably dull and stuffy, and come up with themes that help him connect his story.

Almost 50 years ago, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I checked out many library books by the likes of Yale President Timothy Dwight, who shows up on Noll's pages often enough. In those pre-computer days one could read the names on the cards of those who had previously checked them out. I found "Perry Miller" and "Henry S. Commager" in those at the University of Chicago library, and found that in many cases—as with Dwight's benumbing systematic theology—that only the first few pages had been cut and thus possibly read after 150 years. Trust me to trust him: Noll has read widely in such works.

One final still preliminary word: Noll knows that the scene he describes has changed vastly. At the opening of his period, the time of Jonathan Edwards, there was not a single Roman Catholic church in New England. That circumstance was changing by the end of his period, that of Abraham Lincoln. Today not a single county in New England hosts more members of any denomination than do Catholics, and in the "land of the Pilgrims' pride," Catholics make up more than half the churchgoing population in each county. Noll is undeterred. I think of a book title by my other main dissertation adviser (Sidney Mead was one), Daniel J. Boorstin: The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. Noll's book could be called The Lost World of the [mainly] New England [mainly] Puritan Divines. Yet however inaccessible to most of us the metaphysic of the Jeffersonians or the Edwardsians and older evangelicals may be, they survive and work their influence even as the nation moves on.

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