John Mason Neale

John Mason Neale was born in London in 1818, the son of an Evangelical Anglican clergyman, and he was the kind of boy who collects languages the way other boys collect trading cards. Later at Cambridge he won the university's prize for sacred poetry so often that it became a small embarrassment. He read Latin and Greek and went on to Hebrew, Syriac, plus a familiarity with a shelf of others, and what he loved most in all of them was the old hymnody of the church, the songs the Greeks and the Latins had sung at prayer for more than a thousand years.

Many might have expected him to rise high as a scholar, but he struggled greatly two different ways. His health was rough, suffering from tuberculosis like many of that era. The disease would end his life early, and he was often too weak to stand at an altar. His proclivities toward recovering the ancient faith also left him out of favor with some of the leadership in the Church of his day. Neale loved the ancient inheritance of the English church, its Gothic and its ceremony and its religious orders, but at that time that love was not welcomed in his church and suspected of disloyalty. Consequently, the advancement and accolades that might have come to a man of his gifts never did. In 1846 he was made warden of Sackville College, a crumbling Jacobean almshouse for old men in the Sussex town of East Grinstead. The salary was small and the post was a backwater. He stayed there, servring faithfully for the rest of his life, turning the backwater into a wellspring.

From that almshouse Neale did something no-one else was doing. The Reformation restored worship into the common language so everyone could understand God's Word and the service as a whole. However, as Henry VIII forcibly closed monasteries to enrich himself, thousands of years of faithful Christian songs (in Latin and Greek) began to fall to the ground. Neale set himself to give it back. He took the Latin sequences of the medieval West and the Greek canons of the Eastern church and turned them into English verse that could actually be sung, keeping the meter and the rhyme and, far harder, the fire and focus of the originals. When an English congregation opens Advent with O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, they are singing Neale's translation of a recovered medieval Latin song written to expand the even older "O Antiphons" (medieval call and response verses). When they open Palm Sunday with All glory, laud, and honour to thee, Redeemer, King, they are singing Neale's rendering of a hymn that a bishop wrote in prison more than a thousand years before. "Of the Father's Love Begotten," "The Day of Resurrection," "Christ is Made the Sure Foundation," "Good Christian Men, Rejoice": these came through his hand, and most who sing them have never heard his name.

This work that most believers in the English world have greatly enjoyed was done against opposition in his own day that would have stopped a weaker man. Neale also founded a sisterhood, the Society of Saint Margaret, to nurse the sick and teach the poor, one of the first orders of women in the English church since the Reformation. The Bishop of Chichester censured him for his affinity for the ancient liturgies, practices and later for the Society. He forbade him to officiate in his own diocese. The ban stood for some fourteen years, and these disputes did not stay politely on paper. In this hostile milieu, when one of the young sisters died of fever in 1857, a mob that believed salacious gossip that the convent was a prison for stolen daughters attacked the funeral, tore the sisters' veils, and assaulted Neale. The violence and censure would not stop his faithful work. He went back to his college and his Latin and his sisters, and kept working, largely unappreciated in his own day.

He died on the sixth of August, 1866, the feast of the Transfiguration, worn out at forty-eight. He had held no high office, and he was buried in a country churchyard beside the almshouse where he had spent twenty years in the shadows. But the words he had rescued did not stay in the shadows with him. Every year at the turn of the liturgical calendar, throughout the world, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" has become Advent's nearly universal anthem and one of the most loved of its seasonal songs. The whole English-speaking church begins its longing for the Lord's coming on words John Mason Neale recovered. It has never stopped singing them, and likely never will. The man his own age pushed to the fringes furnished the songs the church can no longer do without. Neale was denied ordinary English preferment and suffered serious opposition, yet became one of the most influential translators in English hymnody. The kingdom of God spreads like leaven, often invisible and in the background through all the faithful and loving labors of His saints. Even today Neale's name is largely forgotten, but God's work through a faithful, sickly servant echoes down through the ages to His Glory.