Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

INTRODUCTION XV
after this! How do we put them away as childish things, and feel
ashamed that we should set such value on the vituperative filth
which is poured forth upon Aeschines and Antony, political rivals
on the narrow stage of a corner of this httle world.
I believe that of those who have really grappled with
Tertullian's difficulties, few will challenge this verdict of a
most competent judge.
I can conceive few more valuable aids to classical scholarship
than a digest, not on the plan of the Dutch uariorum
editors, nor yet on the scissors-and-paste plan of Dindorf, of
aU that is permanently valuable in commentaries and miscellaneous
remarks on the Christian apologists, say to 500 A.D.
The work should appear by itself, and would have a permanent
value, whatever manuscripts might spring to light. Critics and
commentators should be read in order of time and each allowed
credit for his contributions—I would not ruthlessly clip away
even the biographical confidences with which old scholars enlivened
their learning—; no quotation should be repeated, but
the entire composite note should be fused into unity, references
being reduced to one uniform pattern. Each special subject, as
the calumny about Thyestean feasts, should be exhausted in
some one note, and cross references given. The editor would
be in excellent company for some years, and would learn something
of the meaning of catholic communion, as he forgathered
with the Spanish Jesuit La Cerda, the French jurists Didier
Herauld (Heraldus) and Nic. Rigault, with Le Nourry and Tillemont
and Ceillier, Mosheim and Semler, Oehler and Ebert,
Kaye and Blunt^ and Pusey^, Neander and Oehler (sic) and
Bohringer and Noldechen^- Perhaps no two men ever more
thoroughly mastered every detail in the field of the early apolo-
^ Right Use of the Early Fathers. Here p. 432 Lightfoot might have
found, cited from Theoph. ad Autol. 11 f., a far more apt parallel to Philem. 11,
than that which he cites from c. 12 of the same book.
•^ Notes (ascribed by Kaye to Dodgson) on Dodgson's excellent translation
in the Library of the Fathers. It is interesting to learn that the citations
in these notes were verified by one who left us, J. B. Morris.
* On this la.test monograph see Llidemann in Theol. Jahresber. hrsg. v. R.,A.
Lipsius, X, 1891, pp. 128—9. Lipsius, alas, is no more, but this annual, of
unrivalled excellence, is continued by his Jena colleagues.