been reduced to poverty, he removed with his parents to Hamburg, a
commercial city on the Elbe, and one of the four free municipalities of
Germany. In the Hamburg gymnasium, corresponding in rank with our American
academies, though prescribing a wider range of studies, he received his
first public instruction. It is related of him, that he used frequently to
steal into one of the book-stores, and for hours together sit buried in
some rare and erudite volume. And here the original bent of his genius was
early developed; subtlety, profoundness, and intense subjectivity of
thought were noticed as the distinguishing characteristics of his mind. In
a letter from Neumann to Chamisso, bearing date February 11th, 1806, when,
of course, he was only seventeen years old, it is said of him: "Plato is
his idol, and his perpetual watchword. He pores over that author night and
day; and there are probably few who receive him so completely into the
sanctuary of the soul. It is surprising to see how all this has been
accomplished without any influence from abroad. It proceeds simply from
his own reflection and his innate love of study. He has learned to look
with indifference upon the outward world." Such was the beginning of his
illustrious career. He was thoroughly a Platonist. And it happened to him,
as to so many of the early fathers of the church before him; he was led
from Plato to Christ. The honored walks of the Academy were exchanged for
the manger and the cross; and so he passed from Judaism to philosophy, and
from philosophy to faith. "Pray and labor," writes he in one of his
letters, "let that be the bass-note, or rather praying merely; for what
else should a human, or even a superhuman do than pray?" This was the
dawning of the light. Of his progress in the Christian experience, we have
no means as yet of tracing the steps. We only know, in general, from what
he started, and to what he came.
In the April of 1806, he joined the University at Halle, where he came
under the influence of Schleiermacher, whose learned and thrilling voice
was the first to sound the return of infidel Germany to the truth as it is
in Jesus. Schleiermacher was then thirty-eight years old, in the first
bloom and vigor of his faculties, and made, of necessity, a very profound
and durable impression upon the young and ardent Hebrew Platonist, who was
already, in obedience to his own impulses, seeking the way of life.
He had been in Halle about six months, when the city was captured by the
French under Bernadotte. The University was immediately suspended by
Napoleon, and the students ordered to disperse. Neander fled, with one of
his friends, to Göttingen, the place of his birth, where, joining the
University, he came under the instruction of Gesenius, afterward the great
Hebrew lexicographer, then but twenty years of age, and just commencing
his distinguished career. The manner of their introduction to each other
is a curious bit of literary history worth preserving. Gesenius was
returning to Göttingen from his native place, Nordhausen, which was then
in flames, having been set fire to by the French. The soldiers of the
broken Prussian army were hurrying to their homes. In the general flight
and confusion, Gesenius saw two young men on their way from Halle to
Göttingen, one of whom had broken down, unable to go any further, and was
entirely out of money. He procured a carriage for the unknown young
student and conveyed him to Göttingen. That young student was Neander; and
this little adventure led to a friendship which lasted for life, the gulf
which subsequently yawned between them, in respect to matters of faith,
abating nothing of their mutual respect and kindliness. "At first it was
painful to me," said Neander, writing from Göttingen, "to be thrown into
this place of icy coldness for the heart. But now I find it was well, and
thank God for it. In no other way could I have made such progress. From
every human mediator, and even every agreeable association, must one be
torn away, in order that he may place his sole reliance on the only
Mediator."
In 1809 he returned to Hamburg to become a pastor. But the city had a
small fund to support one of its theologians as a lecturer at Heidelberg.
This was wisely appropriated to Neander, who promised more as a scholar
than as a preacher. Accordingly, in 1811, we find him established at
Heidelberg as a teacher in the University, he having previously, on his
public profession of Christianity, assumed the name of _Neander_ deriving
it from the Greek, [Greek: nheos hanêr], "a new man," to signify
the entire change which had come over him. The family name was Mendel. The
year following he was appointed Professor Extraordinary, which, in plain
English, means a professor without a regular salary from government, and
shortly issued his work on "The Emperor Julian and his Time," the first of
those monographs which awakened the admiration of his learned countrymen,
and paved the way for the great undertaking of his life, "A General
History of the Christian Religion and Church."
In 1813, when but twenty-four years of age, he was called to a
professorship in the then recently established University of Berlin, and
signalized his removal thither by a work on "St. Bernard and his Age."
Five years later, he published a work on Gnosticism, and in 1821, his
"Life of Chrysostom;" besides some treatises of minor note, which we need
not pause to enumerate. At length, in 1825, when of course he was
thirty-six years old, the first volume of his General History of the
Church appeared. And to say that this work put him directly at the very
head of Christendom as the expounder of its inward life, is saying only
what we all know to be true. After that, he turned aside occasionally in
obedience to other calls of duty, at one time to write a history of the
Apostolic Age, and at another the Life of Christ, but always returning to
his General History, as the one great task appointed him of God to do. As
I parted with him in the spring of 1848, my heart drawn out toward him
with an admiring tenderness and reverence, such as I had never experienced
toward any other living scholar, I could not forbear assuring him, that
many prayers would go up for him in America as well as in Europe, that he
might be spared to complete his work. "I hope it," he replied, "but that
must be as God wills." But this wish of his heart was denied him. He died
in Berlin on Sunday, July 14th, 1850, in the midst of his unfinished
labors. He had published what brings us down to the year 1294, and was
then at work upon the centuries which lie between that and the
Reformation. The posthumous volume, edited by Schneider, still falls
short, by nearly a hundred years, of that important epoch. Had he been
spared to proceed thus far, we had been the better reconciled to his
dying; although his countrymen were anxious to have him turn his peculiar
powers upon the Reformation itself, and the world-wide movements which
have grown out of it. But this was not to be. He died, leaving no one to
take his mantle; died, too, somewhat prematurely, for he was only
sixty-one years old.
Of his personal appearance, which was altogether unique, descriptions have
frequently been given. He was small of stature, his height not exceeding
five feet and four or five inches. He had studied so hard, exercised so
little, eaten so sparingly and suffered so much from imperfect health,
that his muscles seemed entirely relaxed and flabby. His hand, when he
gave it in salutation or in parting, was like that of a sick child. But
his hair remained as black as a raven. His brows were shaggy and
overhanging, and his black eyes, when ever and anon the drooping lids were
lifted away from them, shot forth a very deep and searching light. As one
sat over against him, watching his words, he might easily imagine himself
gazing through those glowing orbs back into the ages. His study, up two
flights of stairs, overlooking one of the public squares of the city, was
a place to be remembered. Its furniture was a plain round table, a
standing-desk, an old sofa and two or three chairs. High up on the walls
between the book-shelves and the ceiling, nearly all round the room, hung
engraved portraits of distinguished men; and he showed his noble
catholicity of spirit, in having the great men of his native land all
there, without regard to their peculiar schools and sentiments. His
library contained about 4,000 volumes. They filled the room; table, chairs
and sofa were loaded with them; they lay in stacks upon the floor; and, in
some cases, were piled, two or three tiers deep, into the shelves against
the walls. To anybody else the library would have been a chaos; but he
could lay his hand at once upon any book he wished for. It was in this
room, thus crammed with books, that he used to entertain the little
parties he invited to sup with him. The repast was always frugal; the
conversation, on his part, such as might have gone into print. A
man-servant brought in the refreshments on a tray; or, sometimes, one of
his pupils officiated. His only sister, who kept house for him during the
greater part of his life, never made her appearance at these exclusively
masculine entertainments. He himself rarely paid any attention to the
progress of the meal, but seemed to be as much a visitor as any of his
guests. The little he needed was soon dispatched, and his thoughts were
again afloat, sounding along from theme to theme.
He never married, and, at the time I speak of, was almost alone in the
world. Neither father, nor mother, nor any other near relative remained to
him, save his sister, Johanna, whose care of him had need to be almost
maternal. Well-nigh every day in the year these two might be seen walking
out together to take the air. They went always arm in arm, a beautiful
embodiment of the tenderest affection. Hardly the king himself attracted
more attention in the street. Scarcely a person he met failed to raise his
hat and salute the venerable scholar with the heartiest good will. As he
was both short-sighted and suffering from diseased vision, he had to
depend upon his sister to know who bowed to him; and it was amusing to see
his returning salutation bestowed, in almost every instance, a little too
late. Many anecdotes were afloat in Berlin, and indeed all over Germany,
going to illustrate his habits of abstraction and absent-mindedness, some
of which no doubt were true, and all of which were likely enough to have
been so.
An exact description of his manners in the lecture-room would, by any one
who never saw him, be thought a caricature. He entered the room with his
eyes upon the floor, as if feeling his way; a student stood ready to take
his hat and overcoat and hang them up in their places; while he went
directly to his stand--a high pine desk; threw his left elbow upon it;
dropped his head so low that his eyes could not be seen; tilted the desk
over on its front legs, so that you expected every moment to see it
pitching forward into the lecture-room, with the lecturer after it; and,
seizing a quill, always provided for the purpose, began at once to speak,
and to twist and twirl and tear in pieces the quill. Sometimes, in the
heat of his discourse, he would suddenly jerk up his head, whirl entirely
round with his face to the wall and his back to the audience, and then as
suddenly whirl back again, his words all the while pouring along in a
perfect torrent of involved and fervent thought. Add to this a constant
writhing and swinging of his legs, with a frequent slight spitting,
produced by a chronic weakness of the salivary glands, and you have a
picture of the outward man known in Berlin as John William Augustus
Neander; to be known in history as one of the most learned, revered and
beloved teachers of our century.
While it is indispensable to our full and lively appreciation of Neander
that these little things be known of him, no one will be so foolish as to
let such accidents and eccentricities of the outward life divert his
attention from the grand and rarely equalled manhood which lay behind and
beneath them. To give anything like a just estimate of this manhood would
be no easy task, however. His native endowments, the attainments he had
made in the learning pertaining to his department, and the part he was
called to play in the regeneration of German science and German faith,
were all remarkable. From the first glimpse we catch of him, when, at 17
years of age, he had given his head and heart to Plato, he strikes us as
no ordinary character; and our wonder deepens at every step, till at last
we behold him sinking exhausted amidst his labors, and all Christendom
gathered in sorrow around his grave.
His native instincts, tastes and sympathies were all singularly pure and
generous. His family attachments were strong. In the latest periods of his
life, when she had long been dead, the name of his mother could not be
mentioned by him without a visible gush of deep and tender emotion. The
loss of his favorite sister, some years before his own departure, almost
shattered him. For days he drooped and mourned amongst his books, and
could do no work. Only the thought that God had taken her to Himself, and
that He doeth all things well, finally availed to quiet him. So of all his
friends; he never forgot and was never false to them. But his special care
was bestowed upon the young men of the University, who had gathered about
him, in the spirit of a most enthusiastic discipleship, out of all
Germany, and indeed out of nearly all Christendom. To the last he
continued to be a young man himself, as fresh, impulsive and eager, and
with as entire a freedom from all appearance of assumption and authority,
as though his pupils and he were merely peers. There was at once a warmth,
a blandness and a child-like simplicity of manners, which made him the
idol of every heart. And he carried the same amenity of temper into all
the theological controversies of his life. He never stooped to ungracious
personalities, and never seemed to be in pursuit of victory at the
expense of truth and fairness. The result was that he was never assailed
with personalities in return. Through all the bitterest contentions which
raged around him, he was uniformly treated with respect and deference. Not
that men were ignorant of his opinions, or thought him neutral, but
because he was felt to be an Israelite indeed, in whom there was no guile.
He committed himself to no clique, and allowed no clique to be committed
to him.
In his personal habits he was temperate and frugal in the extreme; though
not for the sake of accumulation. His income from his books and lectures
must have been considerable; but he gave it nearly all away. Hundreds of
indigent students could testify to his generosity, while amongst the poor
of the city, there were many pensioners upon his bounty.
In regard to his intellectual gifts and powers, their peculiar cast has
already been intimated. The dominant feature of his genius was its deeply
subjective and spiritual character. The accidents of a subject never
detained him for a moment from his search after the essential and the
abiding. Outward circumstances were of little interest to him. And in this
direction lay the main defect of his mind; it was too exclusively
Platonic, subjective and spiritual. Had his profound Germanic
intuitiveness of vision been tempered with a little more of our homely
Anglo-Saxon common sense, the combination would have been well-nigh
perfect.
What has just been said of his intellectual peculiarities will help us to
understand also his religious life. It was preëminently an inward life; a
fire in the very marrow of his being. As it was his own solitary and
independent reflection which first turned his feet toward Nazareth and
Calvary, so was it by deep and steady communion with his own heart that he
advanced in sanctity. The natural and unchanging atmosphere of his life
was that of faith and prayer. His religious experience was rooted in
peculiarly deep and pungent views of sin. Not that he had gross outward
offences to be ashamed of; but he felt the law of evil working within him,
disturbing his peace; and he longed for the serenity of a child of God.
Thus did he learn his need of Christ. His pupils relate with much interest
how, on the evening of one of his birth-day festivals, when they were
gathered at his house, he spoke to them of his own spiritual infirmities,
and with trembling voice confessed himself a poor sinner seeking
forgiveness through atoning blood. Theologically, he was comparatively
indifferent in regard to minor points; but he clung with the tenacity of a
martyr's faith to the great essentials of the Gospel. His religious life
was therefore at once very fervent and very catholic. Loving Christ with
all the ardor of a passion, he loved with a generous latitude of heart all
those of every name in whom he discerned Christ's image. The motto adopted
by him as best describing his own aim and method, was that of St.
Augustine: "Pectus est quod facit theologum." _It is the heart which makes
the theologian._ It was a Divine Form, for which he was ever seeking,
while he walked about amongst men, as he walked up and down the centuries
of our Christian faith, murmuring to himself: "It is the Lord."
As a writer of church history, his first great claim to gratitude is on
account of the living pulse of faith and love which beats through all his
pages. He traces the golden thread of Christian life through the darkest
centuries. He does much to save the church of God from reproach, and God's
own gracious promise from contempt, by showing how much there has been of
Christian grace and truth under the worst forms and in the worst ages. He
has thus made his History what he said it should be, "a speaking proof of
the Divine power of Christianity, a school of Christian experience, and a
voice of edification and warning sounding through all ages for all who are
willing to believe." Of the original sources of history, particularly for
the earlier centuries, his knowledge was profound, and his use of them
masterly. How thorough and how fair he is, can be fully appreciated only
by those who explore for themselves the fountains from which he drew his
materials. His chief defect is in the matter of form. He had but little
dramatic power. He gives us the inward life, but not the outward stir and
shock of history. Nor is he remarkable for analytical sharpness in his
delineation of the growth of Christian doctrine. It is in the sphere of
experience and life that he succeeds the best. His own doctrinal views
were not, at all points, quite up to our English and American standards of
orthodoxy. But these points were of minor importance. All that is cardinal
was precious to him. With peculiar fidelity did he cling to the Head,
which is Christ, and was full of that faith which conquers the world and
saves the soul.
His last days, as described by his friends and pupils, were in marked
keeping with his whole career. On Monday, the 8th of July, at 11 o'clock,
he lectured at the University. But he had been for some time back much
feebler than usual, the weather was sultry and debilitating, and his
system was out of tune. His voice failed him two or three times in the
course of the lecture, and it was only by a desperate struggle that he got
to the end; his strength barely sufficing to bring him home. The
impression upon his class was such, that one of the students, turning to
his neighbor, said: "This is the last lecture of our Neander." Immediately
after dinner, which he scarcely tasted, his reader came. He dictated on
his Church History three hours in succession, repressing by force of will
the rising groans, his debility all the while increasing. At 5 o'clock the
symptoms of a dangerous illness appeared; but he would not abandon his
work. His sister, who came to expostulate with him and warn him against
further effort, was sent impatiently away. "Let me alone," he said; "every
laborer, I hope, may work if he wishes; wilt thou not grant me this?" At
seven he was compelled to pause. His reader gone, his first thought was to
call back his much loved sister, and say to her: "Be not anxious, dear
Jenny, it is passing away; I know my constitution." But his physicians
were agreed in the opinion that the very worst was to be feared. They
succeeded, however, in subduing the symptoms of the disease, which was a
violent cholera, and began to hope. The next morning, having hardly got
breath from this first furious attack, he inquired with touching sadness,
"shall I not be able to lecture to-day?" When answered in the negative, he
distinctly demanded that the suspension should be only for that one day.
In the afternoon of Tuesday, he called out vehemently for his reader,
desired him to go on with Ritter's Palestine, with which he had been
occupied, and impatiently blamed the anxiety of his friends who had
dismissed his assistant too hastily. He then, according to his daily
custom, had another of his pupils read to him the newspaper. He followed
the reading with lively attention, making his remarks now of agreement and
now of dissent, till at length he fell asleep, and so ended the day's
work. Later in the afternoon, while racked with pain, it occurred to him
that his sister might think of foregoing sleep on his account, which he
begged her not to do. Wednesday he had the newspaper read to him, and made
his comments, as usual. Thursday night brought with it a convulsive
hiccough. Friday, his spirit was clear, peaceful and full of love. But
Friday night extinguished the last hopes of his friends. The pains he
endured were excruciating. With an indescribably affecting and deeply
tender voice, before which no eye remained tearless, he exclaimed, "Would
to God I could sleep." Saturday he was clamorous for the servant to bring
him his clothes, that he might dress and go about his work. His sister
came: "Think, dear August, what thou hast said to me when I have rebelled
against the directions of the physician, 'It comes from God, therefore
must we acquiesce in it.'" "That is true," answered quickly the softened
voice, "it all comes from God, and we must thank him for it." During the
day he asked to be taken into the study. The sweet sunlight, streaming on
his nearly blinded eyes, refreshed and gladdened him. After this, a bath
of wine and strengthening herbs was administered, which seemed to do him
good. Finding himself amongst his books again, he rose upon the cushions
which supported him, and, to the astonishment of all, began a lecture upon
the New Testament, and announced for the coming term a course of lectures
upon the Gospel of John. At half-past nine, having inquired the hour, he
fell asleep. When he awoke, it was Sunday. There came back a gush of
bodily strength, the last leaping of the light before it flickered in the
socket. Taking up the thread of his history where he had dropped it two
days before, he began to dictate for some one to write. The passage was
about the mystics of the 14th and 15th centuries. The concluding sentence
was: "So it was in general; the further development is to follow." Then
turning to his sister, he said: "I am tired; let us make ready to go
home;" as though they were somewhere on a long and wearisome journey. And
then rallying his last energies in one parting word of tenderness to her
who was bending over him with a breaking heart, he murmured, "Good night,"
and died.
Thus he died with his harness on, not aware, probably, that he was so near
his end; else he might have uttered some dying testimony, which would have
passed into the literature of the church to be the comfort of other saints
in their mortal agony. But, on his own account, no such dying testimony
was required. For thirty-seven years he had stood his ground gallantly in
Berlin, witnessing for Christ in the face of a learned skepticism, and he
could well afford to pass directly, without an interlude, from the toils
and conflicts of earth to the joys and triumphs of the redeemed in heaven.