Boy, I would like the morning paper,” said a kind yet imperious voice to me as, at 6:30 A.M., I handed out newspapers at the railway bookstall in my home town. I glanced in awe at the well-dressed, distinguished man who thus commanded me, as I, a six-teen-year-old lad, handed him the paper and took his money. For he was the person whom the evening before I had heard thrill a great congregation with a tremendous sermon on “Prevailing Prayer.”
It was an anniversary occasion, and for such church events John Henry Jowett was a name to conjure with. He had come from Birmingham, where he was minisister of Carr’s Lane Congregational Church, for this special event. When I reached the church it was packed to overflowing, with several hundred people outside. I wormed my way through the crowd and came face to face with an usher guarding a closed door. “You can’t go in,” he said; “the church is already packed to suffocation.” “Do you think that Christ would keep a boy from hearing the Gospel?” I countered. That did it! He opened the door to let me in, and several scores of people got in behind me before the door could be closed again.
The preacher’s text was: “When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few. Pray …” (Matt. 9:36–39). After many years three things stand out in my memory, above the overwhelming impression of the sermon as a whole. One was the thrilling way in which he said Pray, and finished reading the text with that great word. The second was a quotation from the Latin poet Horace: “I hate the vulgar crowd and keep it at a distance,” which Jowett contrasted with, “When he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them.” The third was a personal illustration: “When I pray for my little girl, whom I have left home in Birmingham, tonight, I will be cutting a channel of grace from the throne of God to her heart.” That is what he made us feel intercessory prayer essentially is: cutting channels through which the divine power and grace can flow to meet human need.
Five years later, soon after I had entered Spurgeon’s College as a student for the ministry, I heard Jowett preach two mighty sermons from Spurgeon’s famous London pulpit. It was in the opening month of World War I. At that time Jowett was at the pinnacle of his fame as the pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, and was paying a return visit to his native land. The great church was filled to overflowing, and several hundred people outside vainly sought admission. Both morning and evening sermons were based on texts taken from the prophecy of Isaiah. The morning one was a bold utterance in which Jowett urged Britain to be a mediating power between Germany and France. “In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance” (Isa. 19:23–25). This was a theme which he took up with vigor and devotion after the war, also, when he had returned to Britain as pastor of Westminster Chapel, Buckingham Gate, London. He endeavored in practical ways to bring about a reconciliation between French and German Christians, recalling them “solemnly and tenderly to their common brotherhood in Jesus Christ.”
Jowett’s evening sermon in Spurgeon’s tabernacle was based on a verse much more familiar than the morning text: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isa. 40:31). The preacher spoke with dramatic effect about power to fly (for youth), power to run (for the middle-aged), and power to walk (for the elderly)—power which comes to those who put their trust in the Lord.
I once heard a noted minister say that he did not care for Jowett’s preaching because it was too flowery, and not floury enough: “When I am hungry I would rather go to a baker than a decorator; and Jowett is a decorator.” His preference was G. Campbell Morgan. I doubt if the analogy was a genuine one. At any rate, whatever decorating Jowett may have done on that Sunday in August, 1914, the impression left on most of his hearers was, I think, that they had been fed with the Bread of Life.
A Hundred-Year Mark
This year is the hundredth anniversary of Jowett’s birth-date (August 23, 1863). He died at the age of fifty-nine. He was then the minister of Westminster Congregational Church, situated within a short walk of Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral (Catholic), and Westminster Central Hall (Methodist). His was a strategic position, and he made full use of it. The church was crowded every Sunday, reminiscent of the days when Campbell Morgan occupied that famous pulpit.
Before Jowett had returned to England, just as the war was closing, several churches in Britain had sought to secure him as minister—St. George’s West Free Church, Edinburgh (the illustrious pulpit of the great Alexander Whyte), and Richmond Hill Congregational Church, Bournemouth (where the persuasive J. D. Jones preached for forty years). But it was to London that he wished to go, for he felt that there he could best serve the Church and his nation in those distressful days.
In 1915 an effort was made to secure him as successor to R. J. Campbell at the City Temple, and the deacons would have extended him the call. But the majority of the church opposed this, on the ground that some years before Jowett had severely criticized Campbell’s so-called “New Theology.” Fancy that—a congregation refusing to have as its minister the man who was so frequently referred to in the press as “The Greatest Living Preacher”!
From the very beginning, discerning friends and listeners saw that Jowett was destined for pulpit greatness. This was clear even in his student days at Edinburgh University and at Airdale and Mansfield Theological Colleges. It became even more evident during his six years’ ministry in his first pastorate, St. James’s Congregational Church, Newcastle-on-Tyne. It was therefore no surprise when Jowett was called to succeed the great Robert William Dale at Carr’s Lane Congregational Church, Birmingham. Dale was the intellectual leader of English Nonconformity, a mighty exponent of evangelical Christianity, and a bold advocate of the social implications and applications of Christian principles. Once when a somewhat narrow brother, objecting to Dale’s political interests, said: “Dr. Dale, there are no politics in heaven,” the great man retorted: “Yes, and there are no evils in heaven either.”
Preaching With Heat And Light
How different were Jowett’s preaching and writings! He was wise enough, in succeeding Dale, to be himself. Before he entered upon his great ministry in Birmingham, he had made up his mind to develop the type of preaching he had already found effective in Newcastle-on-Tyne. So he was devotional instead of didactic, emotional rather than intellectual. That does not mean that his preaching was all heat and no light; he gave much care to the construction of his sermons, and there was much thought in them. He realized, however, that the mere abstract statement of Christian truths lacks the power to move men’s wills and set their hearts aflame. So was he able to take up where his illustrious predecessor had left off, and continue in another vein the evangelical tradition, not only of Robert William Dale, but also of Dale’s Puritan predecessor, the distinguished John Angel James.
Like Dale, Jowett was “mighty in the Scriptures,” yet in a different way. He had his own technique in expounding the Word, and this became more and more effective as the years passed. He had no liking for “topical preaching,” unless the topic was something to be found in the Bible. He felt that the preacher who spent his time in the pulpit presenting essays on remote subjects, or even in dealing with the so-called “living issues” of the time, was failing to proclaim “the unsearchable riches of Christ.”
Of course, Jowett seems not to have passed through what the medieval mystics called “The Dark Night of the Soul.” In this respect he was like Alexander Maclaren, but unlike Campbell Morgan. Therefore he had no liking for apologetics in the pulpit, and no confidence that proclaiming the social gospel would be of service to the Church of Christ. Probably he felt—as James Denney did—that most preachers who proclaimed the social gospel did so because they had no other Gospel to preach.
It has to be admitted that on both counts Jowett’s attitude was extreme. There is room in the modern pulpit for sensible apologetic sermons, even though it is true that “it has never pleased God to save His people by argument.” Successful apologetics serves the useful purpose of prying open closed minds. Furthermore, the modern preacher cannot be indifferent to the social and political problems of the time—racial discrimination, for example, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. It is the one-track mind in the pulpit that has to be deplored; the preacher who seldom talks about anything else than the evidences for Christianity or the East-West tensions is offering a truncated Gospel.
When Jowett returned to England in 1922 it was clear that the war had made a great impact on his preaching. His hearers noted with satisfaction that new notes had crept into his sermons, even though he still spoke persuasively about the great apostolic themes. Christ—crucified, risen, ascended, the Lord of Life and Glory, of whose kingdom there would be no end—was still the center of his message. But Jowett had become more ecumenically minded; he now saw more clearly the social implications of the Gospel; and above all he felt the urgent necessity for the Church to lead the way in the establishment of international peace. Alas that he died when he was at his best, a victim of pernicious anemia. His death at a time when his voice was so much needed was as much a tragedy for the Church as was the death of William Temple twenty years later.
In essence Jowett was an old-fashioned preacher. He was well-versed in what are called the “assured results” of modern biblical criticism (had he not been trained by the great philosophical theologian Andrew M. Fairbairn and the fine Old Testament scholar Archibald Duff?), but he never obtruded such matters into the pulpit. Was it because he did not wish to commit himself? At the time of the great preacher’s death an influential religious journal contained an article entitled, “The Tragedy of Dr. Jowett,” suggesting that he deliberately refused to face up to the perplexities of the faith. Thus while he was able to comfort the saints he was unable to enlighten the doubter. And even in addressing himself to those who were secure in the faith, his was a “Gospel of delicate sympathy rather than of sturdy strength” (Horton Davies, Varieties of English Preaching, p. 42).
Jowett was a preacher par excellence of the certitudes of the Christian faith. If he did not canvass in the pulpit the intellectual problems of the Gospel, it was not because he was afraid to do so but because he regarded such questions as irrelevant. He is reported to have said privately to a fellow minister: “The man who spends half-an-hour in the pulpit trying to prove that there were two or three Isaiahs is a fool; the man who spends the time trying to prove that there was only one is a bigger fool.”
Was he not wise in concentrating on the centralities of the Gospel? As Ernest H. Jeffs points out, in his Princes of the Modern Pulpit, the keynote of Jowett’s preaching was grace. The grace of God revealed in Christ he held to contain all the mystery and poetry and sublimity of the Gospel. To him the Bible was the alphabet of the literature of grace; and he rang the changes on this one grand theme as Dale’s successor in Birmingham, as the pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York, and finally in the heart of London, in the shadow of Buckingham Palace.
Yes, he was an old-fashioned preacher; yet he was nevertheless up to date—a mighty herald of the Christ who is always ahead of his people, “the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”
John Pitts has held pastorates in London and Liverpool, England; Montreal, Canada; Bloomfield, New Jersey; and Nassau, Bahamas. A minister of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., he now lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He holds the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of London, and is a graduate in theology from Spurgeon’s College, London.
