In The Dublin Review of July, 1893, Abbot Butler,

O.S.B., writes : ‘The first impression made upon our minds by the foregoing extract is that the arguments advanced in it are one and all quite familiar to us; they have been in common use for three centuries. Whence we gather that Bishop Lightfoot had really nothing to add to the case his predecessors had made out. This is, beyond doubt, a fact of no small importance.

‘But on second thoughts we realise that these arguments are here made to do a different duty from that assigned to them in their traditional use among Protestant controversialists. These latter denied that the Petrine texts had conferred any primacy on St. Peter; and in these circumstances the argument of equality drawn from the passages in St. Paul’s Epistles have had some weight. But unbelieving critics in Germany —men with no higher interests at stake than those of pure scholarship and accurate exegesis—have forced scholars of Bishop Lightfoot’s quality off the old Protestant ground. Now, therefore, that it is recognised our Lord did give St. Peter a primacy, these same arguments are put in evidence of the temporary character of that primacy. There has been a complete shifting of the ground’ (pp. 511-512).

This brief comment of Abbot Butler will help the reader to see the following extracts in their true light:—

I.

Bishop Lightfoot of Durham made a name for profound scholarship by his edition of The Apostolic Fathers, especially St. Clement (1889-1890).