John Alexander Dowie Before Zion

The Letters of an Elijah in Development

By: Antony Hylton

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In 1907, on his deathbed in Zion City, Illinois, John Alexander Dowie gave a woman named Edna Sheldrake a single instruction: "Write. You will find some letters — I give them to you — they will tell the story."
She almost forgot. She almost missed them. She returned to Zion City against her own judgment, stayed on for months without knowing why, and then one day walked into an attic filled with rubbish and old papers and began idly turning over the piles. There she found them: yellowed letter-press books in a handwriting she immediately recognised as Dowie's. A few days later, the attic was cleared. Everything else was burned.
The letters survived. This is them.
Written between May 1872 and 1888 across sixteen years of Australian and New Zealand ministry, these are the private letters of one of the most remarkable — and most contested — figures in the history of Christian healing. They show us a man the public record has obscured. Not the thunder-voiced Elijah the Restorer of the Zion City era, not the man who challenged the founder of Ahmadiyya Islam to a contest of prayer and pronounced the end of Islam at the coming of Christ, not the builder of thirty-seven industries in a single theocratic city — but a young man, often frightened, frequently exhausted, and yet carrying something in him that would not be extinguished.
Here is the first pastorate in a scorching rural parish where the evening congregation numbered two members and a pair of passing road campers he had invited in from the road. Here is the resignation letter, dignified and defeated at the same time. Here is the move to Sydney, the overflowing congregation at Manly Beach, the temperance campaigns that led to his arrest and imprisonment. Here is the courtship of his wife Jeanie, in letters of surprising tenderness from a man of fierce public manner. Here is the letter to William Ewart Gladstone, written with the calm confidence of a man who does not doubt his own standing in the world.
Here, above all, is the divine healing call. In a Sydney study, over the graves of forty of his people, Acts 10:38 opened before him "all radiant with light, revealing Satan as the Defiler and Christ as the Healer." From that moment everything changed. The theology he rediscovered alone in that study — Satan as the author of disease, Christ as the Healer in present power — would be recovered again in the twentieth century by F. F. Bosworth, John G. Lake, and William Marrion Branham, who was born in 1909, two years after Dowie's death, in the city Dowie himself had built.
And here, in the last letter, is the longing that would one day become the Elijah declaration: a longing for apostolic order, for the restoration of the first and most important of all offices in the Church, for "the old apostolic times, when the Timothys and the Tituses could find their Pauls."
He sailed for America in May 1888, aged forty-one. The second volume of letters — covering the American years, the Zion City empire, the Ahmadiyya confrontation, the paralysis and fall — was advertised by the original publisher in 1912 and never appeared. This volume therefore stands as the principal published collection of Dowie's personal correspondence from his formative years, presented here in a new scholarly edition with editorial preface and section introductions by A. Michael Hylton.
These letters were nearly destroyed. They survived by the narrowest margin, through a dying man's instruction and a woman's providence-led impulse. Let them tell the story.
Har Tziyon Publications, Skien, Norway, 2026.