RECOLLECTIONS OF NEANDER,
THE CHURCH HISTORIAN.
BY THE REV. ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, D.D.
In the spring of 1848, during the progress of the European revolutions,
which promised so much and performed so little, I spent several weeks in
Berlin, the capital of Prussia, and saw much, both in public and in
private, of "the father of modern church history," whose name I had long
revered, and whose image now is one of the choicest treasures of memory.
Of all the Christian scholars I have ever known, he stands in my thoughts
without a rival; a child in simplicity, a sage in learning, and in broad,
catholic and fervent piety, a noble saint. In common with hundreds of my
countrymen, I owe him a debt of gratitude, of which this humble tribute to
his memory will be but a faint acknowledgment.
Of Neander's outward history there is but little to be reported; his life
was the retired and uneventful one of a peculiarly intense and abstracted
student. It is hardly a figure of speech, but almost exactly the literal
truth to say that he was born, and lived, and died, beneath the shadow of
the Universities. He was not, indeed, quite so much of a recluse as his
fellow-countryman Kant, the renowned Koenigsberg philosopher, who, though
he reached the age of eighty, and had a reputation which filled all
Europe, was never more than thirty-two miles away from the spot where his
mother rocked him in his cradle.
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