The first book to study the Episcopal high church movement within the context of nineteenth-century American culture. Mullin traces the history of the Episcopal Church from its rise in the early nineteenth century, when it was seen as a refuge from the "excesses" of evangelical Protestantism, to 1870, when the antebellum high church synthesis had largely collapsed. His book not only sheds light on the reasons for the flourishing of this alternative social and intellectual vision but also helps to account for the general crisis confronting religion in America at the turn of the century.