Religion: Come Unto Me

• Share

Hotel guests, not managers, took the initiative in the first effort to bring religion into the hotel.

They were two traveling salesmen and an insurance agent, who happened to be crowded together in one hotel room, in Boscobel, Wis., 30 years ago. All earnest

Christians, they lamented that no Bible was handy. They organized the society of Gideons, which aims to place a Bible in every hotel room in the world, and has distributed nearly a million copies.

Last week it was a hotel manager—John McEntee Bowman, president of the Bowman Biltmore Hotels Corporation—who took the initiative in a new effort.

On the third floor of the Hotel Biltmore in New York a "Meditation Chapel" was opened, for guests and employes alike. It contained benches and a small altar, on which flowers will be kept fresh every day. Over the altar was the inscription, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." (Matthew: 11-28).

Similar "meditation chapels" will be installed as soon as practicable in all other hotels operated by the corporation. Said Mi. Bowman: "The presence of one spot in the hotel, dissociated from the wordly things of life and dedicated to the God we profess to serve, is now recognized as a spiritual necessity."