“In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as in the closing decades of the twentieth,” Walter Conser writes, “conservatives and liberals in Western Europe and North America grappled with one another over the shape of the future.” For three groups of nineteenth-century Protestants-neo-Lutherans in Germany, Oxford Tractarians in England, and a disparate collection of church leaders in America-confessional theology was a bulwark against the ferment of laissez-faire individualism. “If their vision was anachronistic,” Dr. Conser concludes, “they nevertheless understood a message that the twentieth century has been at pains to recover-that human development consists of a balance of intellect and emotions, and that such a balance can only be found in community.”