Background
George Bowen was born on 30 April 1816, in Middlebury, Vermont. His father, a New York merchant and a man of means, spent his money in building up a library in his home, rather than in the education of his children.
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George Bowen was born on 30 April 1816, in Middlebury, Vermont. His father, a New York merchant and a man of means, spent his money in building up a library in his home, rather than in the education of his children.
George's father took him from school at the age of twelve to train him to take over the business. George loathed the business and took refuge in the library, where he read omnivorously.
At the age of sixteen, he decided on a literary career combined with music. His love of operatic music set him to studying German, French, Italian, and Spanish. These he further mastered by four years of extensive travel in Europe (1836 - 40). After that Bowen enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary in New York and graduated from there in 1847.
A chapter in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had turned Bowen in 1833 into a sceptic and bitter critic of all religion. During the years in Europe, he built up his defenses against Christianity. The death of his fiancée in quiet Christian trust changed him. Bowen offered himself to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) as a missionary. On returning home one evening he discovered that a librarian's error had placed in his hands Paley's Natural Theology. This work drove him to a rereading of the Bible and a fresh search.
The result was a "conversion" that completely transformed his life (April 1844). Within four weeks he had offered himself to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and after three years at Union Theological Seminary, New York (1844 - 47), he sailed for India. He arrived in Bombay on January 19, 1848, and to this city, he gave the remaining forty years of his life. Slight of build and not robust, he remained at his post.
Sensing keenly the social chasm between the native and the European, he tried to bridge it by living in the simplicity of the poor, in a little room of an old pensioner's mud-walled house, on less than $200 a year. He withdrew from the American Board and earned his living by tutoring, and later, by editing and publishing the Bombay Guardian.
His conduct pained his friends and stirred up the European community, which felt itself disgraced by this erratic missionary. Yet he was no ascetic, for he went wherever he was invited and ate what was set before him. He later confessed that the chasm was more than social and the experiment not altogether successful, though he did not regret his step.
He preached daily in the streets of the city in the Marathi and Hindustani languages, and served, without pay, as the editor of the Marathi publications of the Bombay Book and Tract Society, and agent of the Tract Depot, to which he transferred his living quarters. In 1871, he associated himself with the work begun by William Taylor, the traveling Methodist evangelist, for the Europeans and English-speaking Indians of Bombay.
This relationship resulted in his joining the Methodists (1873). He became a charter member of the South India Conference, was three years presiding elder in Bombay, and twice, in the absence of the bishop, the president of the Conference.
His death, by pneumonia, revealed strikingly the hold he had gained upon the affections of the city of his life service.
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In 1871 Bowen began associating himself with the work begun by travelling Methodist Evangelist, William Taylor. As a result of this relationship, Bowen joined the Methodist Episcopal Church as a missionary staff member in 1873.
George Bowen was a member of the Bombay Book and Tract Society and a member of the Religious Tracts Society.
Bowen never married.