"Unfortunately it is impossible to the vast majority of Christians to control the testimony taken from the Fathers; and even the few who understand Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian (the four chief languages in which the Fathers have written their works) have neither the time nor a mind to read through the voluminous works of the Fathers. Therefore it has become the fashion to consult some patristic supply-stores, collected by busy linguistic ants with little circumspection but with a strong denominational bias. These are the sources of the apparent stupendous learning of the bulk of theologians, who conscientiously propagate the mistakes and misprints of their text-books without taking the trouble of verifying the passages or of finding out their spuriousness or their interpolations. Again, the quotations of a Father is scarcely correctly understood if the Father himself, his place in history, his friends and foes, his studies and associations, his struggles and defeats or victories, his temptations and occasional falls, his religious life, his passions and virtues, and particularly the origin and drift of the work from which the quotation is taken are unknown to us." (Dr. J. J. Overbeck, from "A Plain View of the Claims of the Orthodox Catholic Church.")
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