Background
Benjamin was born on January 18, 1807 at New Hanover, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Henry and Mary (Noyce) Schneider.
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Benjamin was born on January 18, 1807 at New Hanover, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Henry and Mary (Noyce) Schneider.
After preparatory education at academies in Norristown and Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1826 Benjamin Schneider entered Hamilton College, but at the end of his second year transferred to Amherst, where he was graduated in 1830. He then attended Andover Theological Seminary, completing his course there in 1833.
On October 2, 1833 Schneider was ordained to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, at Nottingham, Maryland. Having been appointed a missionary to Turkey by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, he sailed from Boston three months later and reached Smyrna on January 14, 1834. Commissioned to establish a station at Brusa, he proceeded at once to his post and commenced the study of modern Greek and Turkish. For the next fifteen years that city was his headquarters for evangelical work, principally among Greeks and Armenians. Frequent tours on horseback spread his influence through the surrounding provinces. So great was the opposition from local Ottoman officials and priests of the Oriental Christian Churches, however, that in 1848 the sole tangible fruit of his labors in preaching and in distributing tracts and Bibles was a Protestant Church of seven members in Brusa.
In 1849 he was transferred to Aintab in South-Central Anatolia, and found among the Armenians there a more fertile field for his activities. The one small Protestant Church in the place developed during his seventeen years of work into two entirely self-supporting congregations, day schools, and a high school. In Marash, Urfa, Diarbekir, Adana, and many other towns out-stations had been established and were flourishing under the care of missionaries or of native pastors who were given their theological training by Schneider.
He returned from the United States in 1868 to his former post at Brusa and spent there four more years under conditions vastly more favorable to missionary work than had obtained during his former residence. Ill health forced him in 1872 to take another furlough of two years at home, and when he went back to the mission field it was to the less strenuous task of teaching in the theological seminary at Marsovan (now Merzifon). His strength was unequal to the work, however, and after one more year of service he retired.
He spent the last two years of his life in New Britain, Connecticut, and in Boston, where he died.
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Schneider was strongly Calvinistic in his theology and preaching.
Schneider was a man of great tolerance and simple sincerity.
On September 15, 1833 Schneider married Eliza Cheyney, daughter of Josiah Abbott of Framingham, Massachussets. In 1856 his wife died at Aintab, and while on a furlough in the United States two years later he married her sister, Susan Maria.