"_I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me
in the day of my distress._"
--GENESIS xxxv. 1-7.
It is a blessed thing to revisit our early altars. It is good to return
to the haunts of early vision. Places and things have their sanctifying
influences, and can recall us to lost experiences. I know a man to whom
the scent of a white, wild rose is always a call to prayer. I know another
to whom Grasmere is always the window of holy vision. Sometimes a
particular pew in a particular church can throw the heavens open, and we
see the Son of God. The old Sunday-school has sometimes taken an old man
back to his childhood and back to his God. So I do not wonder that God led
Jacob back to Bethel, and that in the old place of blessing he
reconsecrated himself to the Lord.
It is a revelation of the loving-kindness of God that we have all these
helps to the recovery of past experiences. Let us use them with reverence.
And in our early days let us make them. Let us build altars of communion
which in later life we shall love to revisit. Let us make our early home
"the house of God and the gate of heaven." Let us multiply deeds of
service which will make countless places fragrant for all our after
years.
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John Henry Jowett was born in Halifax, England in 1864. Jowett's father had arranged for him to begin working as a clerk for a lawyer in Halifax, but the encouragement of his Sunday school teacher, Mr. Dewhirst, turned Jowett's heart toward the ministry.
After theological training at Edinburgh and Oxford, Jowett assumed the pastorate of the Saint James Congregational Church. His six effective years of ministry brought him to the attention of the Carr's Lane Church in Birmingham, England, on the death of their pastor. For the next fifteen years the church grew and prospered. Their pastor's vision led them to increase their efforts to bring people to Christ. In 1917, the mayor of Birmingham said the church had changed the town with "crime and drunkenness having decreased."
Jowett came to America for the first time in 1909 to address the Northfield Conference founded by D. L. Moody. While in America he preached twice at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York. The church immediately asked him to come as its pastor. Jowett refused, having received a petition, signed by more than 1,400 members of his church in England, begging him to stay. The Fifth Avenue Church called him again, and then a third time. Finally Jowett concluded that this was God's leading for his life. He assumed the pastorate in 1911.
Although his preaching style was not dynamic (he read all of his sermons), the depth of his knowledge, the clarity of his language, and the power of his life commanded respect. Attendance at the church which had dropped to 600 on Sunday morning rose to 1,500. Lines up to half a block long formed, waiting for unclaimed seats. Jowett began preparing his Sunday sermons on Tuesday, following a meticulously detailed schedule.
When G. Campbell Morgan resigned the Westminster Chapel in London in 1917, Dr. Jowett once again crossed the ocean to take a new church. This would be his final pastorate. Declining health forced him to give up preaching in 1922, and his death in 1923 took from the world one of its most gifted and dedicated preachers.