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the comical form vanished before its own solid contents, and served only to make them the object of higher admiration. For Neander all this was perfectly natural, and without the remotest thought of effect; altogether indeed there never was perhaps a man more free from affectation.

All these singularities of his outward appearance indicated, that he was a stranger on this earth, and that he was formed wholly for the kingdom of the idea. His ignorance of worldly life and business, his perfect freedom from all the temptations of sensuality and vanity, his superiority to much that for others forms an indispensable need, his indifference towards the material side of existence, fitted him for his purely inward calling and for undisturbed communion with the still spirit world of the past. He was an eunuch from his mother's womb, and consecrated this gift to the Lord, became thus also an eunuch for the kingdom of God's sake (Matt. xix: 12). He belonged to the exceptions, for whom the life of celibacy is a moral duty, and the means of greater activity and success, as it was for Paul and Barnabas. Instead of a wife however, God had given him a true female companion in the person of a similarly unmarried sister, who took on her the care of his few wants with the most tender devotion, attended him almost daily in his walks under the lindens, and with kind hospitality entertained his numerous friends and pupils. She was also indeed highly peculiar, intellectual withal, and not wanting in wit and literary culture, but at the same time was a good housekeeper and altogether a very sensible practical person, supplying thus her brother's defect. The peaceful and innocent living together of this original pair had in it something uncommonly touching, and no one could mistake the wise hand of Providence in their connection, for the accomplishment of the great spiritual work, to which Neander, so to speak, had been predestinated.

As regards the character of Neander, it was universally esteemed and admired. True, he also had decided theological opponents; for the Orthodox of the more strict class he was in many points too lax and yielding, for the Rationalists too positive and firm; but all entertained for his character a sort of sacred veneration, and treated him accordingly with much more mildness and forbearance than is usual with such difference of views. His unusual learning was not of itself sufficient to protect him from assault; what surrounded him as an impenetrable tower, and made him invulnerable, was his moral purity and elevation, which at once struck even the most superficial observer, and in regard to which all room for doubt was cut off by his

showing himself always immediately as he was, the very personification thus of the simplicity of the dove. Any attack upon his character, any impeachment of his motives, could have sprung only from stock blind passion, would have awakened indignation throughout the whole theological camp of Germany, and so must have resulted almost inevitably in the moral discomfiture of the antagonist himself. Neander was one of those truly great men, with whom theory and practice, head and heart, fall perfectly together. Not without reason had he chosen for his motto: "Pectus est quod theologum facit." He pursued theology, not as an exercise of the understanding merely, but always as a sacred business of the heart also, which he felt to be most intimately connected with the highest and most solemn interests of man, his eternal welfare and worth. The living centre and heart's blood of the science was for him faith in Jesus Christ, as the highest revelation of a holy and merciful God, as the fountain of all salvation and sanctifying grace for the world. Whatever he found that was really great, noble, good and true in history, he referred directly or indirectly to the fact of the incarnation, in which he humbly adored the central sun of all history and the innermost sanctuary of the moral universe. There were no doubt more orthodox theologians than Neander; for it is well known, that with all his regard for the symbolical books, he would never confine himself to their measure and conscientiously refused to sign the Augsburg Confession; but among all there was not one perhaps, n whom doctrine was to the same extent life and power, in whom theoretic conviction had so fully passed over into flesh and blood, in whom the love of Christ and of man glowed with so warm and bright a flame. Here, in this unfeigned life-breathing piety, which had its root in Christ's person and gospel and formed the foundation of all his theology, lay the irresistibly attractive charm of his lectures for every piously disposed hearer, and the edifying character of all his writings. Whilst however in this practical soul engaging character of his theology he fell in with the pietistic school of Spener and Franke, which asserted just this side of religion, the rights of the heart, the necessity of a theologia regenitorum, over against a lifeless orthodoxy of the intellect-he was on the other hand far removed from all pietistic narrowness and circumscription. His extended historical studies had served to enlarge his naturally liberal mind to the most comprehensive catholicity, which it were gross wrong however to call latitudinarianism. He never lost his sound and simple sight for the main object, the life of Christ proceeding from a supernatural source, but he

thought too highly of this, to compress it into the narrow bounds of a human form, some single tendency or school; he saw in it rather such an inexhaustible depth of sense, as could be in some degree adequately expressed only in an endless variety of gifts, powers, periods and nations. What a difference is there not, for example, between an Origen and a Tertullian, a Chrysostom and an Augustine, a Bernard and a Thomas Aquinas, a Luther and a Melancthon, a Calvin and a Fenelon; or when we go back to the Apostolical Church itself, between a Peter and a John, a James and a Paul, a Martha and a Mary! And yet Neander knew, how to trace out, and greet with joyous gratitude, the same image of Christ variously reflected in all. This wili be spoken of more particularly hereafter, when we come to set forth his merits as a church historian; here we notice the wideness of his heart simply as an essential element in his practical piety. Between it and his studies there existed, undoubtedly, a relation of reciprocal encouragement and support. Thus was Neander in the noblest sense the friend of man, because Christ's friend, at home in all spheres of the invisible Church, the exact impression of evangelical catholicity, and an interpreter of the precious doctrine of the communion of the saints, which transcends all limits of time and space, and comprehends all the children of God under the One Head Christ.

Here however must be brought into view a trait, of which indeed his writings furnish only occasional outbreaks for the most purt in prefaces, but which in his personal intercourse came to a very marked prominence. Neander's spirit, with all its love and sofiness, was yet capable also of very strong and decided aversion. This is by no means unpsychological. Hatred in truth is only inverted love. The same force that draws towards it what is in harmony with God, repels from it with equal determination what is of a contrary nature. John, the disciple of love, who lay on Jesus' bosom, was at the same time a son of thunder, who was ready to pray down fire from heaven upon the enemies of his Divine Master, forbade to salute such as should deny the fundamental mystery of the true divinity and humanity of Christ, and according to ancient story forsook a public bath suddenly, when he found that it contained Cerinthus the Gnostic heretic. We have often thought, that this apparent contradiction of mildness and harshness, gentleness and holy passion, in the case of the Apostle, who in his Gospel passes by like a still peaceful breeze, while in the Apocalypse he moves with the rushing force of the hurricane or storm, found its solution in Neander, though it is on account of his mildness

only that he has generally been compared with John. It is well known, that the same Neander, who as a historian could do justice to the most different tendencies, and who took even heretics as far as possible into his protection, showed himself impatiently intolerant towards altogether kindred manifestations, when they came before him in our time. It is known, that on every op. portunity in conversation he expressed his decided antipathy towards two leading forms of thought belonging to the present time; namely, against the Hegelian philosophy and theology on the one hand, and against the positive or right side of this also in such men as Marheineke, Göschel, Dorner, Martensen, no less than the so called negative left, as represented by Baur and Strauss; and then on the other hand against the technical church orthodoxy, whether standing in the service of the Union, like Hengstenberg's Kirchenzeitung, or putting on the form of exclusive Lutheranism, as in the writings of Rudelbach and Guericke.' Here we must take care to distinguish well between right and wrong. Neander saw here two dangerous extremes, which threatened to rob the youth of Germany of the treasure of evangelical freedom and to impose upon it new chains. From the Hegelian philosophy he feared the despotism of the spirit; from the strict orthodoxy, the despotism of the letter. He hated the onesided intellectualism and panlogism of the first, the narrow spirit and harsh judgments of the last. There Christianity seemed to him to lose itself in the clouds of idealism, here to fall into stagnation and stiffen into dead forms. Besides he held it altogether vain, to seek the restoration by force of any past period of the Church as such, or to dream of infusing new life again into that which has been once for all judged and set aside

Of the last I seldom heard him speak, and then only in the most passing way and with contempt-as of an ungrateful copyist, who misused the hard work of other theologians, particularly those belonging to the "United Evangelical Church," in the service of his ultra-Lutheran dogmatism and fanaticism. The dishonorable dependence of Guericke's Church History on The works of Neander, Hase, and others--of his “ Symbolik” on the copied lectures of Ullmann, (which in the general part, as Ullman himself once told me, he made use of by pages and chapters, almost word for word, without the slightest acknowledgment of the source,)—of his Introduction on various books in the same line, used but not quoted, among others Gerlach's N. T., &c.-is something well known; and would not be noticed here at all, had not an English Quarterly in this country, for which otherwise we have only the best wishes, in repeated instances, with well meaning ignorance, praised this same Guericke, as one of the greatest if not the very first among the scholars of Germany, and as a model theologian worthy of universal study!!

by the course of history. We honor now the motives which lay at the bottom of this whole view; and as regards his opposition to the left side of the Hegelian school, we are of one mind with it entirely. For this modern Gnosticism represents the perfection of scientific unbelief, denies the existence of a personal God, the self-conscious duration of man after death, treats the Gospels as a book of fables, declares most of the N. T. writings to have been produced by the pious fraud of the period after the Apostles, and dissolves all christian ideas, so far as it has any left, into the creations of a philosophy that ends in pure mist and smoke. Against this arrogant pantheism, different from atheism only in form, this lifeless formalism of the understanding, that destroys at last all soul in man, and turns him into a pure speculator on the open heath, an unfruitful thinker of thinking, a heartless critic and fault finder, Neander has often in private conversation entered his vigorous protest, asserting the authority of the Bible dochine concerning God, and the claims of our common life, which can never possibly be satisfied by such dialectical play though it be never so brilliant. And it is only to be wished indeed, that he had taken occasion in a public way, to assail much more sharply than he has done in fact, in his Life of Christ for instance the purely negative special pleading of the mythologist Dr. Strauss, and in his Age of the Apostles also the altogether similar proceeding of Baur, Schwegler and Zeller, with the Acts of the Apostles and the N. Testament Epistles. As regards however the positive christian speculation which has leaned more or less on the Hegelian philosophy, he certainly carried his opposition too far, although we may well adinire his sense for the simple, sound and natural, which often lay at the bottom of it. There was much no doubt to object to in the various attempts of a Göschel, a Marheineke, &c., to unite Hegel's philosophy with biblical christianity and church orthodoxy, much that was sickly and false; but still the necessity of a speculative theology, aiming to satisfy the highest requirements of reason, lies deep in the process of Protestantism itself, and many of the best and most gified men, (think only for example of Daub, Dorner, Rothe) have devoted and still devote their noblest powers to this great problem, the reconciliation of reason with revelation, not despising in such task the help of this profound and comprehensive thinker, who may well be styled the German Aristotle. Neander had the less cause to denounce root and branch the Hegelian philosophy, with all be. longing to it directly or indirectly, as he himself in one most weighty point fell in with it, namely in the idea of development,

VOL. III.-NO. I.

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