Anglican Commemoration
Priest, Scholar, & Hymnographer
August 7 · d. 1866
also known as J.M. Neale
John Mason Neale was the greatest hymn translator the English language has known. From an obscure wardenship in Sussex, in poor health and under his bishop's displeasure, he reached back across a thousand years and gave the English-speaking church the hymns of the ancient and medieval world in its own tongue: "O come, O come, Emmanuel," "All glory, laud, and honour," "Of the Father's love begotten," and dozens more that congregations still sing without knowing whose gift they are.
John Mason Neale was born in London in 1818, the son of an Evangelical clergyman, and he was the kind of boy who collects languages the way other boys collect birds' eggs. 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, and 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.
He might have risen high. Two things stood in his way. His health was wretched; a disease of the lungs that would kill him young left him often too weak to stand at an altar. And his churchmanship was wrong for the hour. Neale loved the Catholic inheritance of the English church, its Gothic and its ceremony and its religious orders, at a time when that love was suspected as a secret road back to Rome. So the preferment that should have come to a man of his gifts did not come. 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 the rest of his life, and turned the backwater into a wellspring.
From that almshouse Neale did the thing no one else could do. The Reformation, in scouring the English church of much it judged corrupt, had also let a thousand years of Christian song fall to the ground, and 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 of the originals. When an English congregation opens Advent with O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, it is singing Neale's translation of a medieval Latin antiphon. When it keeps Palm Sunday with All glory, laud, and honour to thee, Redeemer, King, it is 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.
The work was done against opposition that would have stopped a softer man. Neale 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. For this the Bishop of Chichester forbade him to officiate in his own diocese, and the ban stood for some fourteen years. When one of his young sisters died of fever in 1857 and was buried at Lewes, a mob that believed the convent a prison for stolen daughters set upon the funeral, tore the sisters' veils, and knocked Neale off his feet in the road. He answered none of it with bitterness. He went back to his college and his Latin and his sisters, and kept working.
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 Advent since, the whole English-speaking church has begun its longing for the Lord on words John Mason Neale gave back to it, and it has never stopped singing them. The man his own age pushed to the edge furnished the songs the church can no longer do without.
How we know. Neale lived in the full light of the nineteenth century, and the record of his life is correspondingly rich: his own enormous output of hymns, translations, sermons, stories, and church history; the letters and journals his family kept; and the memoirs written soon after his death, the earliest by his daughter and by Eleanor Towle. He was born in London on 24 January 1818, educated at Sherborne and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won the Seatonian Prize for a sacred poem eleven times and helped found the Cambridge Camden Society, the engine of the Victorian Gothic revival in church building. Ordained in 1842, he was kept from ordinary parish preferment by chronic lung disease and by his advanced churchmanship, and in 1846 was appointed warden of Sackville College at East Grinstead, where he remained until his death on 6 August 1866.
His two landmark collections were Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences (1851), which opened the Latin hymnody of the Western Middle Ages to English singers, and Hymns of the Eastern Church (1862), which did the same for the Greek tradition nearly for the first time. The familiar form of his best-known translation shows how such texts travel. Neale first published it in 1851 as "Draw nigh, draw nigh, Emmanuel," and revised it himself for Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861, where the opening became the "O come, O come, Emmanuel" that the whole English-speaking world now sings. Revision of this kind, by Neale and by later editors, is the ordinary life of a hymn, and many of his texts survive in several forms; the substance and the music of them are his.
Neale's Anglo-Catholicism made him a figure of real controversy in his own day. His ritual practices and his founding of the Society of Saint Margaret in 1855 drew the lasting disapproval of his diocesan, Bishop Gilbert of Chichester, who inhibited him for some fourteen years, and exposed his sisters to a public suspicion that broke out in the riot at Lewes in 1857. The hostility eased only late in his life. By the time he died his hymns were already passing into general use across the very divide they had once provoked, and the religious communities he had pioneered were on their way to acceptance; a century after his death the Archbishop of Canterbury dedicated a memorial to him.
Neale is commemorated on 7 August in the Anglican calendars, the day after his death, 6 August being kept as the Transfiguration; his liturgical color is white. He is honored as priest, scholar, and hymnographer, and the Society of Saint Margaret, the nursing and teaching sisterhood he founded at East Grinstead in 1855, continues, with houses on both sides of the Atlantic.
His truest monument is the hymnal. Few services in the English-speaking world pass through a church year without him: "O come, O come, Emmanuel" in Advent, "Of the Father's love begotten" at Christmas, "All glory, laud, and honour" on Palm Sunday, "The day of resurrection" at Easter, "Christ is made the sure foundation" at a dedication, and the carols "Good Christian men, rejoice" and his own original "Good King Wenceslas." He left the church not relics or shrines but words in its mouth, which is the particular immortality of the hymn-writer.
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Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences; Hymns of the Eastern Church(translated from Latin and Greek, 1851; 1862)
Neale's two landmark collections, which gave the Latin hymnody of the West and the Greek hymnody of the East to English singers; his translations are the heart of his legacy and are freely readable online.
Public domain: Texts, sources, and tunes at Hymnary.org, Hymnology Archive
The Life and Work of John Mason Neale, 1818-1866(English, 1995)
Recommended: Michael Chandler (Gracewing)
The standard modern biography, readable and balanced; the place to go for the whole man behind the hymns, his learning, his convictions, and the cost of them.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Further reading. The standard modern life is Michael Chandler's study, listed above. For the contemporary record, the early memoirs are freely readable: a short life by S. L. Ollard is online at Project Canterbury, which also hosts a good deal of Neale's own occasional prose, including his own account of the riot at Lewes.
Online resources. The fullest gateway to Neale's hymns, with texts, sources, and the tunes set to them, is his author page at Hymnary.org. The Hymnology Archive gathers his collections and the scholarship on them.
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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.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52