The late David Wright here published, with some revisions, his collected papers on the theme of infant baptism within a wide historical perspective, taking in Calvin and the Reformed tradition. The collection represents one stamp upon a life's work that exhibits tremendous erudition and scholarship, executed with the scholarly discipline that is capable of being controversial without being polemical. Wright's historical thesis is that, at its earliest, infant baptism is only unambiguously found in the Hippolytan Apostolic tradition that he dates c. ad 215, mentioning two groups of parvuli, of those who can, and those who cannot, answer for themselves. Even here he raises doubts by suggesting that infants of four or five years old might be told how to answer by their parents rather than their parents simply answering for them at such a very young age (pp. 6–7). He later discerns an outline in the historical shadows of a catechumenate for young children which did not involve baptism. He wishes to argue that the Hippolytan text proves that the rite of baptism was normally administered to adults and that here it was simply being extended to children. To his credit, he dissents from Aland's weak argument that Tertullian's De baptismo 5 marks evidence for the beginning of infant baptism in north Africa (p. 8). Tertullian's evidence is rather of a practice well established and that no-one has challenged, namely how can a baby be baptised for the forgiveness of sins when he/she has committed none (pp. 24–8). It was ‘a practice in search of a theology’ that Cyprian was to begin and Augustine finally to consummate in his doctrine against the Pelagians of original sin (pp. 80–8). But here Wright claims, somewhat strangely I think, that Augustine's ‘rationale is one that today's practitioners of infant baptism will scarcely be able to endorse, except perhaps to a very minor extent’ (pp. 42–3). Wright is able to find the east, by contrast with the west, far more ambiguous before Augustine both on baptismal doctrine and baptismal practice. He cites in particular Gregory Nazianzen's exhortation (Oration 40.17, 28) to wait until children are about three years old unless they are in danger of death (pp. 34–5). Indeed, following Ferguson, he will insist that all epitaphs implying the baptism of young children are at most evidence of babies baptised only because they are in danger of death, if not of no value because they are of third-century date. What however does Wright's case amount to if it is intended as an argument for ‘believers’ baptism? He can show different, problematic and in any case inconclusive texts that would suggest a theology of baptism in what he admits to be ‘New Testament obscurity’ and in the Apostolic Fathers (p. 52). Children were clearly included in a rite intended for adults, but he gives no historical evidence that their early inclusion was resisted or objected to by anyone for any reason, let alone for the post-Reformation view that it was a rite for an individual believer making a conscious decision as a kind of symbol of a personal saving experience that was quite separate from it and did not necessarily require it. His example from Nazianzen is a case in point. The reason for the emergency baptism of children is that ‘it is better that they should be unconsciously sanctified than depart this life unsealed and uninitiated’ (Oration 40.28). But these words are surely indicative of any baptism having this saving effect: they lend no support to a credo baptist's denial of the efficacy of a rite received without full understanding of faith. His words are therefore reflections on the usefulness of understanding what is effected in baptism before rather than after the rite, without denying its sacramental effect before such understanding could take place. Certainly that kind of post-Reformation denial cannot be satisfied by any evidence from the history of the early Church. Early baptismal rites were clearly shaped around the responses of adult converts, leaving their pagan world and turning to Christ's new religion. But is this remarkable in view of the fact that most of those receiving Christian initiation were such converts? Children of believing parents, however, were already in their parents' new, Christian world. Again, emergency baptism of children is not remarkable given the large numbers of babies and young children who did not survive until adulthood. Furthermore, no one objected to the efficacy of what Nazianzen claimed for them. Although Wright constantly assumes it to be the case there is no historical evidence before Augustine for hesitancy based upon a deep and unexpressed reservation that baptism was a rite for believers alone, albeit child believers. Such a reservation did not surface in the sources and is probably a reflection of later, Protestant individualism.