Gifts of Genius: A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors
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Gifts of Genius: A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors
American literature; Gift books
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 haner], "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
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