"_Where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work!_"
--JAMES iii. 13-18.
In Milton's "Comus" we read of a certain potion which has the power to
pervert all the senses of everyone who drinks it. Nothing is apprehended
truly. Sight and hearing and taste are all disordered, and the victim is
all unconscious of the confusion. The deadly draught is the minister of
deceptive chaos.
And envy is like that potion when it is drunk by the spirit. It perverts
every moral and spiritual sense. The envious is more fatally stricken than
the blind. He gazes upon untruth and thinks it true. He looks upon
confusion and thinks it order. Envy is colour-blind. It is like jealousy,
of which it is a blood-relation. It never sees anything in its natural
hues. It misinterprets everything.
No one can quench the unholy fire of envy but the mighty God Himself. It
is like a prairie fire: once kindled it is beyond our power to stamp it
out. But God's coolness is more than a match for all our feverish heat.
His quenchings are transformations. He converts the perverted and changes
envy into goodwill. The bitter pool is made sweet. For confusion He gives
order, for ashes He gives beauty, and in the face of an old enemy we see
the countenance of a friend.
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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.