Anglican Commemoration
Priest, Scholar, & Hymnographer
August 7 · d. 1866
also known as J.M. Neale
John Mason Neale was the most gifted hymn translator in the history of English-language Christianity. His translations from Latin and Greek — 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,' 'Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation,' 'Of the Father's Love Begotten,' 'All Glory, Laud, and Honor,' 'The Day of Resurrection,' and dozens more — recovered the hymnody of the ancient and medieval Church for modern congregations. Neale was also a liturgical scholar, a founder of a religious community, and a champion of High Church principles who endured episcopal persecution for his convictions.
Neale's legacy was recognized immediately by the Anglo-Catholic movement and liturgical scholars. His translations were embraced in Anglican and other Protestant churches despite initial resistance from evangelical quarters. The society he founded (Society of St Margaret) continued and expanded, validating his vision of renewed religious community. His methodical approach to translation — studying original languages and historical sources rather than creating new hymns — established a model for liturgical scholarship that influenced subsequent hymnologists. The suppression he endured (being inhibited from his own parish church) became a point of pride for High Church advocates and contributed to the broader vindication of religious communities within Anglicanism by the 1880s.
Neale was born in 1818 in London, the son of an Evangelical clergyman, and educated at Sherborne and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he won the Seatonian Prize for sacred poetry eleven times and helped found the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society), which promoted the recovery of Gothic architecture and medieval liturgical practice.
Neale's churchmanship was firmly Anglo-Catholic at a time when this was deeply unpopular. His health was poor — chronic lung disease plagued him throughout his life — and when he was appointed Warden of Sackville College, a medieval almshouse in East Grinstead, in 1846, it was a position of such obscurity and low salary that it seemed like exile. It became his life's work.
From this improbable base, Neale produced an astonishing body of scholarship and translation. He learned medieval Latin, classical Greek, Syriac, and several other languages in order to translate the great hymns of the Church. His Hymns of the Eastern Church (1862) opened English-speaking Christians to the liturgical poetry of the Byzantine tradition for the first time. His Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences (1851) recovered the Latin hymnody of the Western Middle Ages.
The translations were not mechanical renderings but creative acts of genius. Neale captured the theological substance and emotional power of the originals while producing English verse that was singable, memorable, and beautiful. 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel' — his translation of a twelfth-century Latin antiphon — became perhaps the most beloved Advent hymn in the English language.
Neale also founded the Society of St Margaret in 1855, a religious community for women devoted to nursing and education — one of the first Anglican religious orders since the Reformation. The local bishop, who disapproved of religious communities, inhibited Neale from officiating in his diocese for fourteen years. A mob attacked the convent in 1857. Neale bore it all with patience.
He died on August 6, 1866, at the age of forty-eight, worn out by chronic illness and ceaseless labor.
Almighty God, you gave your servant John Mason Neale special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.