The manner of their introduction to each other is a curious bit of literary history worth preserving.  Gesenius was returning to Goettingen from his native place, Nordhausen, which was then in flames, having been set fire to by the French.  The soldiers of the broken Prussian army were hurrying to their homes.  In the general flight and confusion, Gesenius saw two young men on their way from Halle to Goettingen, one of whom had broken down, unable to go any further, and was entirely out of money.  He procured a carriage for the unknown young student and conveyed him to Goettingen.  That young student was Neander; and this little adventure led to a friendship which lasted for life, the gulf which subsequently yawned between them, in respect to matters of faith, abating nothing of their mutual respect and kindliness.  “At first it was painful to me,” said Neander, writing from Goettingen, “to be thrown into this place of icy coldness for the heart.  But now I find it was well, and thank God for it.  In no other way could I have made such progress.  From every human mediator, and even every agreeable association, must one be torn away, in order that he may place his sole reliance on the only Mediator.”

In 1809 he returned to Hamburg to become a pastor.  But the city had a small fund to support one of its theologians as a lecturer at Heidelberg.  This was wisely appropriated to Neander, who promised more as a scholar than as a preacher.  Accordingly, in 1811, we find him established at Heidelberg as a teacher in the University, he having previously, on his public profession of Christianity, assumed the name of Neander deriving it from the Greek, [Greek:  nheos haner], “a new man,” to signify the entire change which had come over him.  The family name was Mendel.  The year following he was appointed Professor Extraordinary, which, in plain English, means a professor without a regular salary from government, and shortly issued his work on “The Emperor Julian and his Time,” the first of those monographs which awakened the admiration of his learned countrymen, and paved the way for the great undertaking of his life, “A General History of the Christian Religion and Church.”

In 1813, when but twenty-four years of age, he was called to a professorship in the then recently established University of Berlin, and signalized his removal thither by a work on “St. Bernard and his Age.”  Five years later, he published a work on Gnosticism, and in 1821, his “Life of Chrysostom;” besides some treatises of minor note, which we need not pause to enumerate.  At length, in 1825, when of course he was thirty-six years old, the first volume of his General History of the Church appeared.  And to say that this work put him directly at the very head of Christendom as the expounder of its inward life, is saying only what we all know to be true.  After that, he turned aside occasionally in obedience to other calls of duty, at one time to write a history