When I became pastor of The Moody Church in 1980, I knew one of the church rooms was named Harper Hall in memory of the Scottish evangelist who was on a journey to The Moody Church but drowned when the Titanic sank in April 1912. Only recently, however, did I learn the full story of this remarkable man.
Harper’s reputation as an evangelist was so well known that he was invited to speak at The Moody Church in 1910. I have in my possession a photocopy of a letter, in his own handwriting, which reads, “I have been in Chicago for three months, God gave us a very precious and wonderful revival of continuous services each day and sometimes even more often.” He went on to say that he now had been invited back to The Moody Church for another three months of meetings.
And so it was that John Harper, his sister, and his six-year-old daughter (his wife had died) found themselves on the great ship, the Titanic. Survivors later reported that as Titanic began to sink, Harper admonished people to be prepared to die. He made sure his sister and daughter were in a lifeboat even as he continued to share the Gospel with whoever would listen. And when he found himself in the icy water with a life jacket, floating near another man, Harper asked, “Are you saved?”
“No, I’m not saved!” the desperate man replied.
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved!” Harper shouted.
One report says Harper, knowing he could not survive long in the icy water, took off his life jacket and threw it to another person with the words, “You need this more than I do!” Moments later, Harper disappeared beneath the water. Four years later, when there was a reunion of the survivors of the Titanic, the man to whom Harper had witnessed told the story of his rescue and gave a testimony of his conversion recorded in a tract, I was John Harper’s Last Convert.
Before disappearing beneath the two and a half miles of water, John Harper shared, for the last time, the message of Christmas, which, in a nutshell, is that Jesus came to earth to die in our stead that we might be saved. This Gospel does not spare us from drowning in an ocean, but it does spare us from a far worse eternal destruction.
To complete the story: Harper’s six-year-old daughter and her aunt arrived safely in New York, rescued by the Carpathia, and only then learned of Harper’s death. And to the credit of The Moody Church, acting Pastor Reverend Woolley and a deacon traveled to New York to give them clothes and money so they could return to Scotland.
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