At an early period in his life, his father having suffered reverses and been reduced to poverty, he removed with his parents to Hamburg, a commercial city on the Elbe, and one of the four free municipalities of Germany.  In the Hamburg gymnasium, corresponding in rank with our American academies, though prescribing a wider range of studies, he received his first public instruction.  It is related of him, that he used frequently to steal into one of the book-stores, and for hours together sit buried in some rare and erudite volume.  And here the original bent of his genius was early developed; subtlety, profoundness, and intense subjectivity of thought were noticed as the distinguishing characteristics of his mind.  In a letter from Neumann to Chamisso, bearing date February 11th, 1806, when, of course, he was only seventeen years old, it is said of him:  “Plato is his idol, and his perpetual watchword.  He pores over that author night and day; and there are probably few who receive him so completely into the sanctuary of the soul.  It is surprising to see how all this has been accomplished without any influence from abroad.  It proceeds simply from his own reflection and his innate love of study.  He has learned to look with indifference upon the outward world.”  Such was the beginning of his illustrious career.  He was thoroughly a Platonist.  And it happened to him, as to so many of the early fathers of the church before him; he was led from Plato to Christ.  The honored walks of the Academy were exchanged for the manger and the cross; and so he passed from Judaism to philosophy, and from philosophy to faith.  “Pray and labor,” writes he in one of his letters, “let that be the bass-note, or rather praying merely; for what else should a human, or even a superhuman do than pray?” This was the dawning of the light.  Of his progress in the Christian experience, we have no means as yet of tracing the steps.  We only know, in general, from what he started, and to what he came.

In the April of 1806, he joined the University at Halle, where he came under the influence of Schleiermacher, whose learned and thrilling voice was the first to sound the return of infidel Germany to the truth as it is in Jesus.  Schleiermacher was then thirty-eight years old, in the first bloom and vigor of his faculties, and made, of necessity, a very profound and durable impression upon the young and ardent Hebrew Platonist, who was already, in obedience to his own impulses, seeking the way of life.

He had been in Halle about six months, when the city was captured by the French under Bernadotte.  The University was immediately suspended by Napoleon, and the students ordered to disperse.  Neander fled, with one of his friends, to Goettingen, the place of his birth, where, joining the University, he came under the instruction of Gesenius, afterward the great Hebrew lexicographer, then but twenty years of age, and just commencing his distinguished career.