Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Lightfoot, Joseph" to "Liquidation" / Volume 16, Slice 6

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LIGHTFOOT, JOSEPH BARBER (1828-1889), English theologian and bishop of Durham, was born at Liverpool on the 13th of April 1828. His father was a Liverpool accountant. He was educated at King Edward’s school, Birmingham, under James Prince Lee, afterwards bishop of Manchester, and had as contemporaries B. F. Westcott and E. W. Benson. In 1847 Lightfoot went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and there read for his degree with Westcott. He graduated senior classic and 30th wrangler, and was elected a fellow of his college. From 1854 to 1859 he edited the Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology . In 1857 he became tutor and his fame as a scholar grew rapidly. He was made Hulsean professor in 1861, and shortly afterwards chaplain to the Prince Consort and honorary chaplain in ordinary to the queen. In 1866 he was Whitehall preacher, and in 1871 he became canon of St Paul’s. His sermons were not remarkable for eloquence, but a certain solidity and balance of judgment, an absence of partisanship, a sobriety of expression combined with clearness and force of diction, attracted hearers and inspired them with confidence. As was written of him in The Times after his death, “his personal character carried immense weight, but his great position depended still more on the universally recognized fact that his belief in Christian truth and his defence of it were supported by learning as solid and comprehensive as could be found anywhere in Europe, and by a temper not only of the utmost candour but of the highest scientific capacity. The days in which his university influence was asserted were a time of much shaking of old beliefs. The disintegrating speculations of an influential school of criticism in Germany were making their way among English men of culture just about the time, as is usually the case, when the tide was turning against them in their own country. The peculiar service which was rendered at this juncture by the ‘Cambridge School’ was that, instead of opposing a mere dogmatic opposition to the Tübingen critics, they met them frankly on their own ground; and instead of arguing that their conclusions ought not to be and could not be true, they simply proved that their facts and their premisses were wrong. It was a characteristic of equal importance that Dr Lightfoot, like Dr Westcott, never discussed these subjects in the mere spirit of controversy. It was always patent that what he was chiefly concerned with was the substance and the life of Christian truth, and that his whole energies were employed in this inquiry because his whole heart was engaged in the truths and facts which were at stake. He was not diverted by controversy to side-issues; and his labour was devoted to the positive elucidation of the sacred documents in which the Christian truth is enshrined.”