Arrived in Berlin, he joined his friends—­Nelson, Graham, Wallace, and Logan Aikman.  With Nelson he shared a room in the Luisenstrasse, where they set up that household god of all German students—­a “coffee-machine,” with the aid of which, and some flaming spiritus, they brewed their morning and evening beverage.  They dined in the middle of the day at a neighbouring restaurant, on soup, meat, vegetables, and black bread, at a cost of threepence.

At the University, Cairns heard four or five lectures daily, taking among others the courses of Neander on Christian Dogmatics, Trendelenburg on History of Philosophy, and Schelling, the last of the great philosophers of the preceding generation, on Introduction to Philosophy.  Of these, Schelling impressed him least, and Neander most.  Through life he had a deep reverence for Neander, whom he regarded, with perhaps premature enthusiasm, as the man who shared with Schleiermacher the honour of restoring Germany to a believing theology.

Here is the description he gives of him in a letter from Berlin to George Wilson:  “Suppose yourself in a large square room filled with Studiosi, each with his inkstand and immense Heft before him and ready to begin, when precisely at 11.15 a.m. in shuffles a little black Jew, without hat in hand or a scrap of paper, and strides up to a high desk, where he stands the whole time, resting his elbows upon it and never once opening his eyes or looking his class in the face; the worst type of Jewish physiognomy in point of intellect, though without its cunning or sensuality; the face meaningless, pale, and sallow, with low forehead, and nothing striking but a pair of enormous black eyebrows.  The figure is dressed in a dirty brown surtout, blue plush trousers, and dirty top-boots.  It begins to speak.  The voice is loud and clear, and marches on with academic stateliness and gravity, and even something of musical softness mixes with its notes.  Suddenly the speaker turns to a side.  It is to spit, which act is repeated every second sentence.  You now see in his hands a twisted pen, which is gradually stripped of every hair and then torn to pieces in the course of his mental working.  His feet, too, begin to turn.  The left pirouettes round and round, and at the close of an emphatic period strikes violently against the wall.  When he has finished his lecture, you see only a mass of saliva and the rags of his pen.  Neander is out of all sight the most wonderful being in the University.  For knowledge, spirituality, good sense, and indomitable spirit of the finest discretion on moral subjects, the old man is a real marvel every way.  In private he is the kindest but also the most awkward of mortals.  His lectures on Dogmatik and Sittenlehre I value beyond all others, and I would gladly have come to Berlin to hear him alone.”

Besides hearing these University lectures, Cairns read German philosophy and theology for nine or ten hours daily, took lessons in Hebrew from a young Christian Jew named Biesenthal,[5] and in these short winter months acquired such a mastery of German as a spoken language that in the spring he was urged by Professor Tholuck of Halle to remain and qualify as a Privatdocent at a German University.  He also gained a knowledge of men and things German, and a living interest in them, which he retained through life.