John M. Mason

John Mitchell Mason (March 19, 1770 – December 26, 1829) was an American preacher and theologian who was Provost of Columbia College in the early 1810s, and briefly President of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the early 1820s.

Biography Born in New York City, Mason was the son of a prominent clergyman. He graduated from Columbia College in May 1789, and in 1791 traveled to his father's home country of Scotland to study theology at the University of Edinburgh.

Mason continued as pastor of his father's former church for seventeen years, where he developed a reputation as an excellent orator. In 1804, he received a Doctor of Divinity, and from 1806 to 1810, he published Christian Magazine. In 1810, he decided to begin a new congregation, directing the construction of a new church in Murray Street. During this period, Mason was a staunch Federalist. In 1816, his health declined to the point that he found it necessary to resign the office he had assumed in connection with the college, and he resolved to try the effect of a voyage to Europe. Mason then traveled extensively in France, Italy, and Switzerland, and then to England, where he arrived in time to attend the anniversary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, where he delivered a well-received address. and returned to the city of New York. He withdrew from public life, and gradually lost his faculties, with brief periods of lucidity until his death, in 1829.