rines of Christianity.
His father was a Jewish peddler, Emanuel Mendel, and the boy was named
David at circumcision. Various forces co-operated in directing his mind
toward the Christian religion; of which we might mention the philosophy
of Plato, the Romantic School, and above all, Schleiermacher's
_Discourses on Religion_. When seventeen years of age he was baptized
and received the combined name of his sponsors, John Augustus William
Neander. In 1810 he began to lecture in the University of Heidelberg,
and in 1813, owing to the publication of his _Julian the Apostate_, he
received a call to Berlin. He was there brought into the society of
Schleiermacher, Marheineke, De Wette, Fichte, Hegel, Ritter, Ranke and
other celebrated men. It was very significant of the new life now
beginning to be felt, that his lectures were numerously attended. Even
Schleiermacher, his co-laborer for twenty years in the theological
faculty, had a limited circle of auditors compared with the throngs who
went to hear Neander.

His theological views were more positive and evangelical than those
entertained by any of his associates. He shared, with the most orthodox
of them, the opinion that religion is based upon feeling. The Christian
consciousness was the sum of his theology. "By this term," said he, "is
designated the power of the Christian faith in the subjective life of
the single individual, in the congregation, and in the church generally;
a power independent and ruling according to its own law,--that which,
according to the word of our Lord, must first form the leaven of every
other historical development of mankind." Neander was not a man of very
strong prejudices; yet his disapprobation of the destructive nature of
Rationalism was very decided. The reduction of religion to
intellectualism received severe rebukes at his hand on more than one
occasion. "I shall never cease," he declared, "to protest against the
one-sided intellectualism, that fanaticism of the understanding, which
is spreading more and more, and which threatens to change man into an
intelligent, over-wise beast. But at the same time I must protest
against that tendency which would put a stop to the process of
development of theology; which, in impatient haste, would anticipate its
aim and goal, although with an enthusiasm for that which is raised above
the change of the days,--an enthusiasm which commands all respect, and
in which the hackneyed newspaper categories of