Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/324

 THE GENESIS OF A MODERN PROPHET.

JOHN ALEXANDER DOWIE was born May 25, 1847, at Leith Street Terrace, Edinburgh. He is the son of John Murray Dowie, who is still living in Australia. He was educated, as a child, in the Arthur Street Academy in Edinburgh, under the instruction of two good dominies, Reverends John and Charles Downie. At fourteen years of age he took the Dux silver medal for excellent scholarship. He tells of an interesting experience when six years of age. He asked his mother why he was called John and Alexander. When told that they were ancestral names, his curiosity still persisting to know the meaning of the words, he was sent to the Bible dictionary, where he learned that his names had the meanings "Grace of God" and "Helper of Men," His child's mind was quickened by the thought that his names indi- cated his inspiration and his mission, and in that faith he has always lived from that hour.

In i860 he removed with his parents from his native city to Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia. At that time, he says, there was in South Australia no school of higher grade than the one he had recently passed through in Edinburgh ; con- sequently he was put to work as a boy-of-all-work for his uncle, a large importer and maker of boots and shoes. Here for four months he did all kinds of drudgery, from scrubbing the floors to running errands, for eight shillings a week. The business shrewdness so characteristic of the man developed early in the boy, and at the end of four months he transferred himself to a clerkship in the counting-house of a wholesale draper's establishment, where he received thus early five dollars a week. Within a few years he had become a man of experience and of affairs in the young Australian colony, every invoice of imports by a firm doing a two-million-dollar business in European goods passing through his hands as confidential clerk to the resident partner. He then bought an interest in a hardware house which took large contracts for railway supplies with the govern-

310