The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.
§ 7. The spread of patristic learning in England
Thus, the spread of patristic learning in England in the first half of the seventeenth century is not to be judged merely by the incidental scholarship shown by Anglican divines. It also pervaded many puritan divines; it characterised many of the leading preachers, like Jeremy Taylor. Different as the subjects of these writings are, Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, William Prynne, in his Histriomastix (who quotes testimony from 71 Fathers and 55 synods) show that writers found in the Fathers a court of appeal with an authority generally recognised, and the literature of the period revels in multitudinous quotations patristic as well as classical.
The higher criticism which now is occupied with the Bible then lavished its learning on the Fathers. For, though John Daillé, the most learned French pastor in patristic knowledge, in his Traicté de l’ employ des saincts pères, 1628, deprecated absolute reliance on this authority, the subject was acknowledged, by all interested in scholarship, to be of profound relative importance, and only to be transcended by a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures themselves, which, again, depended upon light thrown on them by patristic studies.