Book review: Children and the Great Hunger in Ireland

text. It is important to remember that the number of manuscripts pertaining to Irish Presbyterians in the period surveyed are relatively few and far between. And those that do exist are often concerned with matters of a personal or political nature. The author has, nevertheless, made good use of the J. Gresham Machen papers housed in the Montgomery Library, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, which include some crucial insights on the Davey controversy. Other readers may be disappointed that certain subjects are only addressed in summary form. For instance, the author’s discussion of the 1859 revival is a descriptive taxonomy of various opinions on the revival, which does not help the reader to determine which view was historically correct. Given the broad time frame and the range of topics that the book covers, however, it would be unrealistic to expect in-depth analysis of every subject addressed. One point that needs to be emphasised in relation to Henry Cooke is that his call for greater cooperation with the Church of Ireland was not, as his critics misrepresented it, a demand that they unite with those who persecuted their seventeenth-century forebears. Instead, Cooke was seeking greater unity with Church of Ireland evangelicals, many of whom were Reformed, while at the same time he denounced both the earlier Laudians and the contemporary Puseyites as cryptoRomanists. These minor points aside, The Irish Presbyterian Mind is an excellent overview of the intellectual history of an important Protestant group, and we hope that it will encourage further research in this neglected field.