J. B. Lightfoot was a great 19th century scholar of the early church; he is still widely cited.
The quote below is at the end of an essay on Polycarp of Smyrna that he wrote in response to the then-anonymous author of the book Supernatural Religion (1874). In this, and other essays collected in Lightfoot (1889), he is clearly frustrated by what he regards (with good evidence) as sloppy, incompetent and biased analysis of the early church writers. His essay on Polycarp ends (p141) by acknowledging his debts to the critical German theologians of his day, but appealing to his readers “to exercise their judicial faculties independently” in order to see past “fascinating speculations” to understand the “historical position in all its bearings” of the early church writers:
But I would wish to add one caution. No good will ever come from merely working on the lines of modern theorists. Perhaps the reader will forgive me if I add a few words of explanation, for I do not wish to be misunderstood. I should be most ungrateful if, in speaking of German writers, I used the language of mere depreciation. If there is any recent theologian from whom I have learnt more than from another, it is the German Neander. Nor can I limit my obligations to men of this stamp. All diligent students of early Christian history must have derived the greatest advantage on special points from the conscientious research, and frequently also from the acute analysis, even of writers of the most extreme school. But it is high time that the incubus of fascinating speculations should be shaken off, and that Englishmen should learn to exercise their judicial faculty independently. Any one who will take the pains to read Irenaeus through carefully, endeavouring to enter into his historical position in all its bearings, striving to realize what he and his contemporaries actually thought about the writings of the New Testament and what grounds they had for thinking it, and, above all, resisting the temptation to read in modern theories between the lines, will be in a more favourable position for judging rightly of the early history of the Canon than if he had studied all the monographs which have issued from the German press during the last half century.