THE main value of this study of the Rev Ian Paisley by the Rev Dennis Cooke, the principal of Ireland's Methodist theological college, is that it is written by a Protestant minister and theologian. Previous books on Northern Ireland's most controversial politico-religious leader have been written by journalists, academics and former political associates. None of them has had the knowledge of the Bible and Protestant history and theology to be able to challenge Paisley on the fundamentalist biblical ground he occupies with such thunderous self-righteousness.
Dennis Cooke hits him hard in his biblical solar plexus and, in the opinion of this reviewer, causes him considerable damage. Not that his own flock will take much notice. For them, Cooke will be just one more in a long line of wicked ecumenists who have tried and failed to discredit their beloved leader. For them, Cooke is damned even before he opens his mouth.
The same goes for virtually every Christian denomination in the world, other than a tiny handful of evangelical extremists in Northern Ireland and North America. "One is frequently left with the impression that Paisley really sees his Free Presbyterian Church as the only genuine Christian church in existence," writes Cooke.
The Catholic Church is, of course, the work of the devil. Any expression of faith or doctrine emanating from Rome is regarded as "tainted by Satanic deception
God demands separation from all who preach reconciliation or dialogue with Catholicism, Paisley preaches. "God is a separatist. He did not say to the Devil Let us dialogue, Satan. Let us have a round table conference and see what common ground we have between us.
The problem, Cooke points out is that the great Protestant reformers Paisley so admires, Luther and Calvin, did not believe this. Paisley "has never recognised in even the minutest measure that the Roman Catholic Church is a Christian Church", whereas the Reformers, without exception, took the position that - whatever its faults - it was.
Paisley labels as traitors or "apostates" those Protestants who enter into dialogue with the Catholic Church. Yet he ignores four 16th-century conferences at which the Reformers, including Calvin and Luther's representative, met delegations from the Papacy.
Paisley is similarly selective and self-serving when it comes to quoting John Wesley - another hero - against the Catholic Church. There may have been no scarcity of anti-Catholic polemic in Wesley's writings, but Cooke stresses that neither is there any evidence that the founder of Methodism ever denied Catholicism's position as a Christian church.
Paisley's second great article of faith is that Roman Catholicism, as an instigator of persecution and revolution throughout the world, has been the inspiration behind the "troubles" in the North. In 1972 he even asserted that "the Provisional IRA is in reality the armed wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Its real aim is to annihilate Protestantism."
Thus Paisley preaches a gospel of hatred against anything or anybody whom he sees as being against his God, the God of Ulster's fearful fundamentalist Protestants. He sees his kind of hatred as a natural characteristic of the true Christian. He particularly hates backsliding, ecumenical, "apostate" Protestants, those who use Christ's second great commandment - to "love your neighbour as yourself - to urge peace and reconciliation with Catholics.
Thus he was absolutely furious with Gordon Wilson's forgiveness of the IRA for murdering his daughter in the Enniskillen bombing, on the grounds that "there is absolutely no forgiveness, none whatsoever, without repentance".
Dennis Cooke says he cannot ever recall Paisley mentioning the commandment to love your neighbour - or its companion commandment, to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind" - other than in one passing indirect reference.
Cooke's truest and most depressing conclusion is that while a substantial section of unionism subscribes to Paisley's extreme anti-Catholic philosophy, the task of reconciliation in Northern Ireland is "well-nigh impossible".
It is no coincidence that one of the worst outbreaks of sectarianism of the past 30 years of "troubles" has been taking place in recent weeks in Ballymena, Paisley's home town and the first in the North to have a DUP majority. Paisley's apologists will claim that he is a good MP to his Protestant and Catholic constituents alike, often pointing to the good things he has done for the handful of Catholics on Rathlin island. But the Rathlin Catholics are just the kind of Catholics he likes: marginalised, powerless, and posing no conceivable threat to majority Protestant rule.
Historians of this benighted period of Irish history will indict Ian Paisley for one thing above all: as the leader who made Ulster's 350-year-old tradition of virulent anti-Catholicism into a legitimate - even respectable - political position on the eve of the 21st century. Without him - and, of course, the Provisional IRA - sectarian hatred might have slowly started to become unrespectable, and one element of the poison in Northern Irish society could eventually have been drawn out.