Dr. Schaff and the Roman Catholic Church

Abstract

More eloquent tongues than mine have already paid due tribute to the memory of the venerable scholar, whose great learning and manly virtues we can all unite in praising, without regard to religious or scientific differences, however profound and essential they may be. I will not dwell upon the historical training, the grasp of scientific method, and the ripe scholarship which were distinctive of Dr. Schaff, nor upon his sincere sympathy for the spiritual and religious element in the history of human thought, nor upon the uprightness of his historical conscience, and his desire to be objective and candid in the statement of views which were not his own,—these are the primary qualities which we demand of a Church historian, and especially of one who assumes the delicate and responsible office of an historian of theology. You have requested me to speak of the deceased in his relations with the Catholic Church, and I propose to confine myself to a brief enumeration of the motives why that Church respects such men as Dr. Schaff. He devoted his life in a great measure to the history, the theology, and the original texts and sources of the earliest Christian ages, those distant but all important years when the foundations of the Catholic Church were being sunk, and the great beams were being laid on which she has since arisen. He endeavored to bring back the minds of men to a consideration of those primitive days when there was but one spirit and one heart in the Christian body, when belief and discipline, religious life and organization, were substantially of the same type in all the Christian communities.