grounding and location for his work as well as his academic setting, he nevertheless felt distanced from his adopted Anglican home, and yet committed to stay there. He found himself theologically uneasy about the places where he did feel less isolated – in particular, Quaker meetings. At the same time he found himself unable easily to call himself a theologian, particularly not a systematic theologian, and he concentrated his energies instead on the 'religious studies' (for which read 'historical') side of his work. Nevertheless, the questions he asked, the issues which interested him, the way he pursued that historical work – all were theological, and he knew it. The ambivalence seems not exactly to have haunted him, but at least to have been never far from his working mind. The major work which Frei completed in this decade (after Eclipse) was all historical. He directed a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar in 1976 (his title was 'Modernity as Temptation'), and he delivered various lectures including the Rice Lectures in 1974 (on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Gottfried Herder and Immanuel Kant) and the George F. Thomas Memorial Lectures in 1978 (on Lessing). He also produced a piece of work which he thought of as perhaps his finest: the essay on David Strauss which was eventually published in 1985, although Frei finished it in the very early 1980s after having worked on it throughout the last years of the 1970s. Later theological work In the late seventies, Frei's outlook began to shift. He found himself increasingly drawn away from purely intellectual history and towards social history; in tandem he found his doubts about aspects of the Identity and Eclipse phase of his work crystallizing in a shift away from more theoretical hermeneutical solutions towards more social, "cultural-linguistic" – and, we might say, more ecclesiological and pneumatological – solutions. In the 1978 George F. Thomas Lecture, he issued what can in retrospect be seen as something of a personal manifesto, using the word "sensibility" to denote the object of a kind of historical study which would look for the shape and development of religious styles, attitudes and doctrines firmly embedded in the development and interaction of social institutions of various overlapping kinds. In 1981, he spent some time in England during which he looked, on advice from Owen Chadwick, at visitation returns and sermons from the eighteenth century life of a