A German paper referring to his departure from this world says: Dr. Hering was made acquainted with the doctrines of the New Church soon after his arrival in the United States; he received them with warmth and zeal of the opinion that the action of the homeopathic remedies would, at some time be established by the doctrine of Correspondence. It may be proper here to state that the doctrine of correspondence is a doctrine of the New Church (as taught by Swedenborg). The paper referred to also states: He occasionally mentioned that in his house the first German Christmas, in the whole large city of Philadelphia spread its brilliancy.
The words German Christmas-tree were probably used because it is claimed that the Germans introduced that custom into this country.
In looking at Dr. Hering as a medical man and as a religious man, we see that he was not led by blind faith he was not bound to the doctrine of his predecessors because they were believed by them or for reasons that they were the old and acknowledged doctrines of the world; he would investigate for himself and be a rational believer of that which he accepted as truth. His religious belief differed as much, and even more, from the generally accepted doctrine of the church, as his homoeopathic theory and practice differed from the old school of medicine.
The difficulty of three persons in the Godhead, and how to make one of the three, did not trouble his mind, for he knew and fully understood that the Trinity was embodied in the Divine Humanity of Christ, and that there is but one God in but one person. Nor was it difficult for him to solve the apparent contradiction of the literal sense of the sacred Scripture, neither the apparent contradictions of scriptural statements with the developed facts of this age; for he well knew that the word of God is infinitely higher than human thought of language, and that in the inner life of these literal forms we find an inexhaustable fountain of the Divine Wisdom from which we may drink and never thirst.
From his knowledge of the spiritual world, and the relation between this life and the life to come, he knew that man, as a spiritual being, continues to live, that death is only the departure from one world to another; that it is but the material body that dies, and returns to the earth from which it was taken, there to remain and to rise no more; but that man himself will never die.
When, he, therefore, at the last moments of his earthly life, spoke the words I am dying, he knew that it was but the material form that had fulfilled its mission and would cease to exist, but that he, who had for many years, in and through that body, accomplished great good to this world, would not go from this land of the living to the silent repose of the dead, but from the land of first development and preparation to that of eternal perfection.
Dr.C.W.Taylor expressed himself next in these words:
The air is filled with farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead. Hourly, in some graveyard, the yawning earth is closing around the inanimate forms of loved ones. We are summoned but once to join the innumerable caravan moving on into the silent land.
When the summons came to Constantine Hering, it found him ripe in years and intellect-fourscore years replete with benefits to his brother man. Quietly, as a child, he sank into that last dreamless sleep and was borne to the garden of the slumberers.
He whose soul panted for communion with the great and good, and reached forward with eager struggle to the guerdon in the distance, has passed away.
A flower is plucked from one sunny bower, a breach made in one happy circle, a jewel stolen from one treasury of love. A harvester has disappeared from the summer-field of life, and his funeral winds, like a wintry shadow along the street. A sentinel has fallen from his post, and is thrown from the ramparts of time into the surging waters of eternity.
His heart was hopeful and generous, his life a perpetual litany a Maytime crowned with flowers that never fade.
Deck not his couch with sombre shrouds, It is not death, but only sleep. That kisses down his eyelids now: Then why should we in sadness weep? He has but gained the needed rest From weary toil, from care and strife His fittest deed of praise will be The grandeur of an earnest life.
Take each the lesson to his heart, And in his earnest struggle know That he strives best, who strives for truth, Though faint and weary he may grow You may not reach your highest aim, Nor tread the heights that Hering trod. But do your duty-in that lies The path that leads you nearer God
Dr.C.H.Goodman related the following incidents:
My relations to Dr. Hering were only those of pupil to teacher, for it was my privilege to sit under his instruction during the medical season of 1868-69 in the Hahnemann College of Philadelphia.
I can see him now as he hurried into the lecture room, his long hair flowing over his shoulders, and his eye aflame with zeal and enthusiasm. What scrupulous attention to detail; how minutely and analytically he dwelt upon the symptomatology of each drug, carefully weighing and balancing every expression and utterance. His mind was so full, so teeming with facts and information, the hour was too short to impart them to his hearers.
During my calls at his residence, I was particularly impressed with his having recourse to his Materia Medica at every prescription. My examination hour with him was one of the pleasantest I ever passed. The subject of my thesis being of some interest to him, he discussed it fully and took occasion to enlarge upon his own peculiar views of what constitutes Health and Disease, and of the analogy between the latter and drug- provings. He narrated to me at the same time his experience in curing with Antimonium crudum a large corn on the foot of a sea captain. Why, he remarked with a merry took, In a short time I was consulted by all of the captains in the navy, and they all had corns on the soles of their feet, and I nearly lost my reputation because I could not cure all of them
My last sight of him was on graduation-day, as he sat on the stage of the Academy of Music, beside Dr. Raue, to whom he was especially devoted, completely wrapped up in the music of the orchestra, which was rendering an air from the opera of Der Freischuetz. He was nodding and bending his head in unison with the music, apparently oblivious to all his surroundings, smiles of pleasure brightening up his venerable face as the harmonious strains fell upon his ear.
So was he completely attuned to, and in harmony with the world, and profession to which he devoted his life and best energies, and he fell, like the ripe fruit from the tree and was gathered into the garner of the faithful. _____________
Dr. Philo G.Valentine next recited some verses, cleverly expressing in rhyme, Dr.Hering’s life-story from the cradle to the grave.
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Dr.G.S.Walker then delivered the following oration:
Constantine Hering is dead. The great Healer has passed from the realm of wounds and disease. The Antagonist of Death, and his Conqueror on a thousand hard-fought fields, has yielded at last, when the issue of the struggle was but his own life. Invincible in his conflicts for others, he was mortal only when he struck in his own behalf. And death has gained a splendid prize. If the old chivalric theory be true, that all the honors of the defeated belong of right to the victor, Immortal Death has seldom, in all ages, from the issue of a single fight, won so large a spoil.
The mighty Physician, whose visits to the couch of suffering were as the Angel of Heaven’s mercy, and whose prescription was Healing’s potent spell; the calm, all-furnished schoolman-then the Champion of the Old School-who laid his boyish lance in rest against the Black Knight of Medical Heresy, and, doomed to dismemberment by his Client, was saved by his Adversary, and thence consecrated all the energies of his redeemed strength to the new banner of Similia-bearing it in triumph, through both Hemispheres and in every clinic, under the Southern Cross and Northern Pleiad, and planting it, with dying, hand, on the very citadel of the Enemy : the great teacher whose graduation thesis was De Medicina Futura, and who founded the first College of our Order in the world: whose name lies at the foundation of our Medical Literature, side by side, with that of the immortal Hahnemann: the Poet, whose creative genius found and grasped, and whose sense of harmony set in eternal order and beauty, the great original truths of our system; the Seer, whose prophetic vision pierced the sullen shadows of the Infinite, and brought within the apprehension a common men a revelation of the Divine; the Laborer, whose untiring energies knew no pause of recreation, save in added and deeper toil; the Hercules, who cleansed the fouler than Augean Stables of Medical Science, and encountered and slew the Nemean Lion of Medical Orthodoxy: the gentle, generous, brave, great hearted, wholesouled Man, whose qualities were no more simply great than his attributes were sublimely splendid; all these have gone down in that last desperate struggle, in closed lists, where his only second was a woman. Whose loving hand and tender strength were all unable to hold back from the heart the icy grasp of Death.
In 1878 and 1879 he published 2 editions of his book, Sunstroke and Its Homeopathic Treatment.
Upon Hering's death in 1880 Knerr became responsible for the completion of the 10-volume Guiding Symptoms.
Dr. Knerr wrote 2-volume Repertory to the Guiding Symptoms,