Henry Alline, 1748-1784

P.J. Kemp was a journalist living in Brigham, Quebec.

This is a very scholarly, therefore dry and conventional, biography of an obscure Nova Scotia religious fanatic who lived in the late 1700s. Alline’s only claim to fame appears to have come through a fairly lengthy inclusion of some of his writing in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. But even what James says about him doesn’t invite further study: James characterized him as a victim of melancholia, quoting Alline to the effect that “I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth.” Lucky couple.

Reading Henry Alline has the effect on the reader that Alline in person probably had on those newlyweds: rather oppressive and tedious. Proclaiming someone’s importance and place in history, as Professor Bumsted frequently does of Alline, neither makes it necessarily so, nor convinces. Other religious scholars may find this book fascinating, but there is little to interest the general readership.