Month: November 2012

Then Bishop H.C.G. Moule Remembers J.B. Lightfoot

I came first into his presence when in June i860 1 called on him at his rooms the rooms which had been Isaac Newton’s, nearly two centuries before and asked to be entered on his list of freshmen. Desperately shy was I.  And he, if I do not mistake, felt a little shy too, for it was his nature so to be. But though a Cambridge Tutor certainly in those days could not possibly be intimate with all his pupils, he exercised from the very first a very powerful influence on me by the magnetism of the good greatness of his personality, and the truehearted kindness which looked always through his reserve. All through those years, he was laying the deep foundations of his vast theological knowledge, chiefly in the vacations, and (during term time) by night. No man ever loitered so late in the Great Court that he did not see Lightfoot’s lamp burning in his study window, though no man either was so regularly present in morning Chapel at seven o’clock that he did not find Lightfoot always there with him.
 
From George R. Eden and F.C. Macdonald (eds.), Lightfoot of Durham:  Memories and Appreciations (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1933), 5.

Philip Schaff on J.B. Lightfoot, Bishop of Durham

While looking for a copy of Saint Augustine’s Retractiones online, I came across a little biography called Saint Chrysostom and Saint Augustin by Philip Schaff and noticed that Schaff dedicates the work to J.B. Lightfoot.  In the preface, Schaff explains why:

A high admiration of these truly great and good men is quite consistent with an acknowledgment of their defects and errors. There is a safe medium between a slavish overestimate and a haughty underestimate of the Fathers. No man is perfect save Christ, and no man can be our master in the highest sense but Christ. Amicus Chrysostomus, amicus Augustinus, sed magis amica veritas.

It was in this spirit of free evangelical catholicity that the lamented Bishop Liglitfoot, the greatest patristic scholar of England, prepared his monumental work on the Apostolic Fathers. I have taken the liberty to dedicate this unpretending little volume to his memory.  I regret I have nothing more worthy to offer, but I know he would receive it with the kindness of a friend and co-worker in the service of truth. He wrote to me once that he had received the first impulse to his historical studies from my History of the Apostolic Church; and yet I have learned more from him than he could ever learn from me. He invited me to contribute certain articles to Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography (then under his charge), and sent me all his works as they appeared. Only a few days ago I received, “with the compliments of the Trustees of the LIGHTFOOT FUND,” his posthumous edition of St. Clement of Rome, with an autotype of the Constantinopolitan text a worthy companion of his St. Ignatius and St. Polycarp. The Bible Revision labors brought us into still closer relations. His book on Revision (which I republished with his consent), and his admirable commentaries on Galatians, Colossians, and Philippians, greatly aided the movement in this country.  I shall not forget my pleasant interviews with him at Cambridge, London, Durham, and Auckland Castle. He left a rare example of reverent and modest Christian scholarship that aims first and last at the investigation and promotion of truth.

New York, December 12, 1890                                                       P.S.