The Church of the Nazarene began work in Australia in 1945 at the instigation of a handful of disaffected Australian evangelicals, marginalized from more orthodox believers in their holiness radicalism. They were often looked upon as holy rollers and sinless perfectionists, purveyors of a brand of religion thought to be populist, coarse, and theologically suspect. In America in the 1940s, the holiness movement churches had moved much further toward the traditional mainstream than was the case in Australia. The early Australian Nazarenes saw a decline in the religious fervour of other evangelical bodies, and saw themselves as raised up to champion a return to the apostolic fire of early Methodism. They were, perhaps naively, unaware of the lowering of religious tension in their own mother church. Differences between the ecclesiastical culture of Australian and American Christianity were to prove internal challenges to be added to the challenge of external opposition.

of the British Empire. It was the seat of government and the commercial capital of an emerging Empire. The significance of London was also the reason for the dominance of London Friends in the development of Quakerism internationally, and some of the recently published studies on Quaker transatlantic networks could have been usefully employed to provide a comparative element. There are many errors in the discussion of Colman's time in England. English Presbyterianism was not the same as Scottish Presbyterianism. The managers of the Presbyterian Board gave grants. They did not elect or nominate Colman to be minster at Cambridge or Bath, since English Presbyterian congregations were de facto independent, unlike in Scotland. The Toleration Act was one of two bills and offered only a bare toleration. It did not acknowledge, as Smith claims, "the rights of non-Anglican Protestants to participate in England's political sphere" (p. 5): quite the contrary. The Occasional Conformity Act was to prevent Dissenting laymen, not ministers, from qualifying for office. The Happy Union collapsed in London, but Presbyterians and Congregationalists continued to cooperate in the provinces. The author is right to point to the links across the Atlantic, but the book is too reliant on Colman's correspondence and the study of a single individual to establish his broader thesis.

A number of North American Wesleyan‐Holiness denominations emerged in Australia, beginning in the years following the Second World War. Some of these churches moved from being despised and marginalized sects to established denominations while others remained small and isolated, experiencing little growth. Their story demonstrates that movement along the church‐sect continuum is by no means a smooth and inevitable one. Random processes may lower or raise religious tension within the group thus affecting its movement along the continuum. The strict behavioural standards in Wesleyan‐Holiness churches have gradually been lowered and the distinctive beliefs of these groups have been eroded. Wesleyan‐Holiness churches in Australia have grown primarily through “switchers” from other denominations more than from new convert growth, so that they have become more generically “Evangelical” and less distinctively “Holiness” in their beliefs and practices.

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