The Christian ethic is now one among a plurality of vocational patterns. It can no longer be made legally binding, nor can it easily be employed as an instrument of social pressure. More and more, the Christian life is viewed as a way which one deliberately chooses. Fewer accept it on the recommendation of their parents or as a matter of social convention.

This paper is offered as a preliminary contribution to the debate on the admission of children to Holy Communion. It attempts to examine the basis for the practice, current in many churches, of requiring some Profession of Faith or Confirmation as an essential precondition to participation in the sacrament. Accepting the need for theology to be based on responsible exegesis, the paper sets out to examine the passage 1 Cor. 11.27ff to which current practice has traditionally been traced. The paper then (section II) widens the discussion and advances the hypothesis that the communion services in the early church may not have been restricted to believers only: 1 Cor. 14.23 shows that it was possible for unbelievers to be present at worship, but without mention of the Lord's Supper. And so the hypothesis that worship normally comprised ‘word’ and ‘sacrament’ in the early church is tested on linguistic grounds from 1 Cor. 11 and 1 Cor. 14, to show the possibility of unbelievers' being present when the sacrament was celebrated. The implications of 1 Cor. 16.22 are then explored and the view advanced that it was not impossible for unbelievers to share in the sacrament—the Anathema in that verse being intended to warn participants (including unbelieving participants) in the sacrament to approach the Lord's Supper thoughtfully and carefully.

For many people the period of junior and secondary schooling establishes a pattern of attitudes which persists well into adult life, and, for some, throughout the whole of life. Attitudes are important. Attitudes function as a determinant both of overt behaviour and of personal self-development. It is not surprising, therefore, that educationalists have begun to take the training of attitudes seriously.

The 1978 Reith Lectures have already proved themselves to be remarkable. It was remarkable in the first place that a clergyman should have been invited to give the lectures at all (they are published as Christianity and the World Order, by Edward Norman, OUP, 105 pp., £1·50). It was remarkable that, whilst telling his listeners that the West is becoming increasingly secular, Norman should nonetheless have devoted them almost entirely to an internal critique of the churches. And it was remarkable that he should have provoked over twice as much personal correspondence from the public as did John Robinson at the time of Honest to God. In the circumstances it may seem less remarkable that a number of distinguished academics have already brought out a powerful critique of the lectures (published as Christian Faith and Political Hopes: A Reply to E. R. Norman, edited by Haddon Willmer, Epworth, 155 pp., £1·75).

There is seldom a lack of new studies of Isaiah. In this article I want to mention some aspects of a few recently published studies which direct our attention in different ways to the book of Isaiah, rather than to Isaiah of Jerusalem (or the so-called ‘second Isaiah’) as an individual with an historical role. Not that I am not concerned with the historical Isaiah of Jerusalem: in fact the concern is greater than the following reviews might suggest. Positively I am insisting that our quest for him must start from the book of Isaiah in all its variety and complexity, and not from its few familiar and congenially informative prose sections. Then the more negative suggestion that Isaiah may not have been a ‘prophet’ (at least in the sense that tradition came to regard him) is an attempt to clear the ground for a better point of view.