One day a minister friend walking with him in a Birmingham park wanted to show Jowett how the Holly Blue butterfly differed from the Common Blue. "With the utmost caution," says this minister, "I approached the resting insect, so that I could lift it off the leaf without injury to show him the markings on the underside of the wings. Jowett watched me in silence and then said 'That is just how I pick a word'."

Jowett said that a sermon illustration should be like an honest street lamp--throwing floods of light on the road--and not an item of decoration like a fairy lantern. He felt that an illustration that needed explanation was worthless.

Jowett also wrote his sermon out in full and read it over carefully three or four times until he knew it completely, but for his own reassurance he kept the manuscript before him in the pulpit.

"I turn the pages over and once I see the first word of a page, I know all that comes to the end of the page. I think each sentence over as it comes, so that however often I repeat a sermon, I go through the whole process of thought each time I give it, as though it were the first."

In that way he was able to keep himself fresh in delivery and put the right expression into every word.

Jowett was a prose-poet of the evangel rather than a thinker or theologian. He preached to the saints, or at least to those who accepted the main truths of Christianity but needed to have their faith and hope warmed into a glad certainty. He took them by the hand and led them into a garden of the soul, flowering with sweet, peaceful thoughts grown in the rich soil of meditation and study and prayer.

He never seems to have been afflicted by doubts and thus was not able to reach the intelligent outsider. As Dr. Horton Davies says: "His task would always be to edify the convinced rather than to convince the doubters."

Jowett's sermons are still worth study for their grace of language, sensitive but virile spirituality and luminous suggestiveness of thought.

They are notable also for their clear organization. He divides his thoughts into three or four heads and makes it clear when he moves from one point to another.

The language fits the thought as a well-made glove fits the hand. It is a clear glass through which the thought shines bright. There are many pictorial phrases: "A perfectly dry eye is blind and a perfectly dry religion has no sight," "Sentimentalism is born among the flowers: noble sentiment is born among the snows." He described an old saved sinner as having a face like "a half-ruined chapel, lit up for evening service."

Jowett's expert companions in his work were Joseph Parker and Alexander Whyte. Their portraits were always near him and were easily seen by him, to the last, from his sick bed.

There was virility behind all his gentleness and strength behind all his fineness. There was an extreme delicacy of texture about him which reminded one of the loveliest lace. He combined a shy and sensitive nature with the firmness of tempered steel. John Henry Jowett was a sweet singer of Israel whose instrument was the harp and not the trumpet.