The Christian social reformer, journalist, and poet James Montgomery deserves to be remembered more as a witness to his age than for his voluminous verse. He seldom took a leading role, but he participated in and commented upon most of the important movements and events in this period of vast social change. Swept up during the 1790s in the British response to the French Revolution and the ensuing wars, he became active in the antislavery movement and devoted himself to a wide range of philanthropic ventures. Conducting a weekly newspaper in Sheffield, a notable hotbed of English radicalism in his time, Montgomery was ideally situated to record the shifting tides of political sympathy and to leave a testament of his own liberal idealism. His Evangelical affiliations are evident in his poetry as well as his prose, especially when he associates the struggle for liberty with the freedom to...