‘The evolution of orthodoxy’ might easily be understood as a process which belongs wholly to the past: the development of Christian doctrine, on which Henry Chadwick has shed such a graceful and penetrating light, would then be contrasted with a complete and stable construction in which Christianity has come to rest. But to call it complete and stable need not mean that further progress is excluded; at the very least, new challenges are likely to arise, and old truths will need to be re-stated. And most of our generation, and of our juniors, will think this programme far too tame: in their eyes, only an obstinate and secluded mind will persist in defending an orthodoxy that is purely static. I for one would certainly wish to see its evolution as a continuing process, in which established positions need to be clarified and some false steps retracted, in the faith that a better grounded and better articulated consensus of belief may be attained.

From such a standpoint one can turn with a rueful admiration to a handbook which has given invaluable service to a succession of beginners in theology, the Enchiridion Patristicum of M. J. Rouet de Journel, completed in 1911 and appearing in its twenty-fourth edition in 1969.