The Crisis of Order: Clerical and Cultural Authority Massachusetts, 1780-1833. By Peter S. Field. Amherst, Massachusetts, 1998 (University of Massachusetts Press, P. O. Box 429, Amherst, MA 01004). $34.95. Peter S. Field describes himself as social historian of intellectuals (p. 4) setting out to describe early nineteenth century collapse of Standing (the old Puritan Congregational establishment), emergence of an alliance between clerical and prospering merchants - Brahmins, and creation of a secular, high culture which helped legitimate claims to social dominance of this elite class. Like Renaissance merchant princes, wealthy Bostonians such as Samuel Dexter, John Lowell, Harrison Gray Otis, and Samuel Eliot used their financial influence to attract bright, articulate, cultured ministers such as John Thornton Kirkland, Jeremy Belknap, and Joseph Stevens Buckminster to important Boston pulpits. Unlike rest of Massachusetts religious establishment, Boston churches had always survived or perished a competitive, voluntaristic environment. Most of these churches were controlled by wealthy holders who wanted their clergy to be eloquent, cultivated men with a refined literary sensibility. Gentility mattered far more than theological orthodoxy. The political influence of this Brahmin oligarchy, Federalists all, was on wane and so they sought to buttress their status through cultural dominance. In 1805 Brahmins installed one of their own as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard College and soon came to dominate Harvard Corporation; old school of prophets became an intellectual and cultural Brahmin bastion. The cultural conquest of Boston was completed with establishment of Anthology Society and its literary organ, Monthly Anthology, creation of Boston Athenaeum, and other philanthropies such as Massachusetts Historical Society. As Field puts it so well, the Brahmin clergy of Boston had transformed God's covenant with Puritan nation into a class compact with a privileged elite. ( n. 10) The Brahmin-clerical cultural alliance, which Field so clearly delineates, was vigorously resisted, and author's account of that resistance is most absorbing part of this book. The orthodox clergy, led principally by indefatigable Jedidiah Morse and allies such as Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, wanted to retain traditional political and moral authority of old Order and saw that authority being seriously undermined, less by Baptists and other dissenters and more by wealthy, influential, religiously suspect pew parishioners and their hireling clergy. Morse, who not incidentally was an accomplished scholar his own right, championed orthodox communicants their struggle for control of their churches with increasingly powerful, wealthy parishioners. At times sounding like Cotton Mather and at others like Senator Joseph McCarthy (an anachronistic parallel irresistible even to Field), Jedidiah Morse championed cause of pure and undefiled religion church councils and courts. The orthodox party fought fire with fire, trying to enforce doctrinal uniformity through clerical associations but also by establishing their own, anti-Brahmin institutions such as Andover Theological Seminary and Park Street Church. The defining moment this struggle was probably Dedham controversy (1818-1821), a parish vs. communicant struggle over church property, leading to a ruling by Massachusetts Supreme Court favor of rights of parish. That decision, as Field says, in effect, put schismatic orthodox churches an identical position vis-a-vis state taxation for support of `Christian teachers' as that of Baptists, Methodists, Universalists, and other dissenting sects. …