work in Liverpool with no superficial knowledge of its varied and many-sided life, and with no wish to find in it a merely "comfortable berth." He saw too clearly its sins and its sorrows, and was bent on bringing to bear upon them, as far as one man could, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which, as he was well aware, afforded the one hope of alleviation. His present position has not been reached at a bound. It has resulted from his fidelity to his early purpose, from his persistent plodding industry, and from his life-long efforts to "make full proof of his ministry." His career offers a stern rebuke to indolence and presumption. The dignities of officialism and its airs of authority are withered in the presence of a man like this, but we can, on the other hand, desire no stronger incentive to the diligent use of such powers as we may possess, and no greater encouragement to honest Christian labour than a knowledge of the work which Mr. Brown has accomplished in Liverpool.

He was, we believe, born in the Isle of Man in the year 1823. His father was the vicar of Kirk Bradden, a quaint and picturesque village some three miles from Douglas, and he is said to have received his education in the first place at home, and afterwards at the Douglas Grammar School. "The child is father of the man," and Mr. Brown must early have been taught to struggle bravely with difficulties, and to make them stepping-stones to success. We should not have ventured to refer to this point had not he himself done so in his "Quarter of a Century in the Nonconformist Ministry," and because the fact may in no small measure account for the many helpful words he has spoken to other strugglers in the battle of life; and for the stress he lays on the necessity of trial as a means of developing our manhood. "My father," he tells us, " was a clergyman of the Church of England. For many years his stipend was less than £100, and he had nine children; and I well remember, when I was a grown-up lad, and when through mere extraordinary good fortune about £50 were added to the salary, it was a time of great wonder and great thankfulness. But now my God, my aged mother, and myself alone know-and no other ever shall know-what privations we all, parents and children, had to endure in trying to subsist on the little barren glebe of the miserable pittance of tithe that fell to the vicar's lot. I have shuddered as often as, during these thirty years, I have thought of the anxieties that so often brooded over that humble and half-ruined vicarage where, if I may be permitted to say so, a well-educated woman and a man of learning and refined taste strove, as working people seldom have to strive, to make both ends meet, in the effort to bring up their children well, and to fit them for taking creditable positions in the world."

At the age of fifteen Mr. Brown came to England and spent two years in the study of land-surveying. He afterwards entered the locomotive works of the London and North-Western Railway Company at Wolverton, where he remained until he was twenty-one. He then drove an engine in connection with the same company for about six

months. During his apprenticeship at Wolverton, however, he was not wholly given to business. He spent several hours every night in study, keeping up his Latin and acquiring a knowledge of Greek. It is in fact said that his first efforts to form the Greek letters were made with a piece of chalk inside a boiler, and we have reason to believe that this was actually the case.

Mr. Brown's wonderful knowledge of human nature, his apparent familiarity with every phase of character, would, no doubt, be greatly aided by his experiences as an engineer, and they would do far more for him than could have been accomplished by mere scholastic training. But he was, at the same time, bent on other and higher things. His heart was set on the ministry of the Gospel, and in order to prepare himself more fully for it, he passed through a three years' curriculum at King's College, intending, of course, to become a clergyman of the Church of England. We do not know whether he ever presented himself to the Bishop for examination-one account says that he did, but at any rate he never entered the Church. His mind was too vigorous and untrammelled to endorse beliefs which he could not substantiate. He probably inherited from his father a dash of "radicalism," and it would be impossible for him to repeat unthinkingly a prescribed creed, or to submit to the bare authority of tradition. His reverence for the Bible effectually prevented that, and the result was that he abandoned some of his early beliefs, and became a Baptist. He himself thus refers to the change. "My kindred and friends were nearly all Church of England folk; I was a Church of England man myself, preparing for the Church of England ministry, when scruples arose in my mind-not so much in regard to State Churchism; not so much in regard to Episcopacy; not so much in regard to forms of worship, but in regard to the baptism of infants, set forth in language that, to say the least, has the sound of ascribing some miraculous efficacy to the rite. I could see neither Scripture, nor common sense in infant baptism; my conscience compelled me to abandon it, at the cost of incurring the opposition, the anger-I think I may add the contempt-of most of my friends; and what was worse, there were some whose pity I had to endure, while a few wrote me most alarming letters, in which they assured me that as I had left the Church of England they considered that I had disgraced myself in this world, and damned myself for the world to come. One good man—a relative of mine and a clergyman-told me he should scarcely dare to walk with me, lest the earth should open as it did for Korah, Dathan and Abiram, and the miracle might, by mistake, engulph him as well as me. The only man of them who regarded my becoming a Dissenter with any composure was my father, who was a clergyman of the English Church, but one of those Radicals who occasionally appear among the clergy, and who are amongst the most out-and-out Radicals, in all the ranks of Radicalism."

After concluding his college curriculum, Mr. Brown went to Liverpool, and, if our information be correct, laboured for some

months as a town-missionary. In the autumn of 1846 the Rev. James Lister-whose name is still widely and gratefully remembered-resigned the pastorate of the church in Myrtle Streeta position he had held for forty-one years. In the following March, Mr. Brown was asked to supply the pulpit, and his probation lasted over the greater part of a year. The church was not one which could be easily satisfied, for Mr. Lister was "a man of learning and piety, a careful student, and an excellent expositor of Scripture, who with all his mind believed, with all his heart loved, and with all his might preached the great truths of evangelical religion." His ministry had been in the highest sense prosperous, and his people would naturally expect his successor to conform to a high standard. We cannot, perhaps, be surprised that "the call" given to Mr. Brown was not unanimous. "A very considerable number of good and intelligent members were opposed to his election, and two out of five deacons resigned their office." The situation was certainly not a pleasant one, but on a young man of Mr. Brown's calibre it could have but one effect. To him it was the reverse of hurtful. Referring to it years afterwards, he says: "I should like to know what right I had, or what right any man has, to expect to pass on through life without encountering things that are disagreeable. That experience was better for me than if every voice had been enthusiastically in my favour. It set before me the task of trying to make friends out of opponents, and I am glad to say that, not through any great exercise of wisdom or forbearance on my part, but through the kind-heartedness of those men themselves, almost without exception, if not entirely without exception, they became thoroughly fast and warm-hearted friends of mine." Mr. Brown's relations with his church have throughout been of the most cordial character. He has "a staff of deacons of which any minister might be proud;" he has enjoyed all the freedom he desired; he has seen nothing in a church-meeting of which there is the slightest reason to be ashamed; and he has never had to complain of any want of liberality either towards himself as a minister, or the objects for which as a minister he has pleaded. His experience is doubtless exceptional; and it is not every Nonconformist minister who can say as he does: "So far as I can remember, on the matter of stipend no words have ever passed between me and the Church; between me and the deacons; no words have ever passed except those of gratitude on my part for generous, and very generous, treatment on theirs. Nothing could be more gentlemanly than the manner in which my feelings have been thought of-nothing more generous than the manner in which all along my wants have been supplied." All honour both to the pastor and deacons of Myrtle Street Church. Would that all other pastors and deacons were in this respect like-minded with them. The aspects of English Nonconformity, which we all regard as the weak places in our policy, and for which we are often-and sometimes unjustly-reproached, would then disappear. Our strength would be increased, and we should witness

a degree of prosperity to which heretofore we have been strangers. Let us commend this example to all whom it may concern.

Mr. Brown's power, as a preacher, was soon recognized, and he was sedulous in his duties as a pastor. The congregation steadily grew, and even among men who had won for themselves the highest reputation, he was soon placed in the front rank. Dr. Raffles was at that time in the zenith of his popularity; Dr. Chrichton was the minister of a large and influential Presbyterian congregation; Dr. Hugh McNeil was fulminating against the errors and aggressions of the Papacy, and Mr. Martineau was the representative of the Unitarians, and delivered, in Liverpool, those marvellously beautiful and suggestive Endeavours after the Christian Life." Mr. Brown is a man of a different stamp from any of these, but in his own line inferior to none of them; and before he had been long in the Myrtle Street Church, it was universally felt that he was an added element of strength to the moral and spiritual life of the town. Thoroughly scriptural and evangelical in doctrine, he was no slave to conventionalities either of speech or action. He had no regard for the false and artificial dignities of the pulpit, and could not adopt a stilted ecclesiastical style. He hated all shams, and could no more have made the pulpit a place for the letting off of rhetorical fireworks than he could have been guilty of dry and meaningless prosings. He appeared before his congregation as an out-and-out Englishman, honest and straightforward, looking at life not with the eyes of a recluse, or from the sheltered nook of a snug profession, but in the light of strong practical sense. He spoke as one who knew the world, boldly rebuking its sins, pointing out its weaknesses and dangers, but always showing, too, its possibilities of virtue and progress and preaching the gospel of a Divine healer and friend. Mr. Brown's delivery is full of force, if not of fire, and cultivated hearers listen to him with pleasure. But he has no sympathy with what is called "pulpit oratory," and is entirely innocent of the graces of style." He speaks in plain unvarnished words, the language of every-day life, and, like Mr. Bright and Mr. Spurgeon, he has a decided preference for good sturdy Saxon. We have no doubt he is a fair classical scholar, and is familiar with the best English poetry. But he has drunk deeply into the spirit of such works as Butler's Analogy, John Foster's Essays, and others of a kindred class. His writings give ample proof of his familiarity with history, and we imagine he could never have written a sermon we heard him preach some years ago, unless he had completely mastered the controversy in relation to Sir W. Hamilton's doctrine of the Absolute and Unconditioned. Mr. Brown's popularity in Liverpool was largely increased by his Sunday afternoon lectures to working men. These lectures, delivered during the winter months, were intended to reach the non-church-going population, and to bring them, if possible, under the influence of the Gospel. Several well-known ministers adopted this method of "reaching the masses," but Mr. Brown (we believe) inaugurated it. He gathered around him every Sunday afternoon an audience of from

three to four thousand, and the lectures, which were published, attained a circulation of twenty, and in some instances, we are assured, of thirty thousand. The subjects on which he spoke were invariably within the range of every-day experience and intensely practical. They were often suggested by scenes witnessed in the Liverpool streets; events chronicled in the newspapers; or by some popular proverb. Thus we find such titles as "Five Shillings and Costs," Cleanliness is next to Godliness," "Taking Care of Number One," "The Devil's Meal is all Bran," "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions," "Time and Tide wait for no Man." Sometimes a section of Scripture would be explained and commented upon, e.g., "The Proverbs of Solomon," "The Lord's Prayer," "The Prodigal Son," "The Golden Rule," "Charity," &c. But whatever the title might be, it was the lecturer's aim to bring the principles of Christianity to bear upon the conduct of daily life-to enforce the morality of the Gospel in opposition to every form of selfishness and sin. Mr. Brown was no flatterer, either of the working classes or of their socalled superiors. As a keen and clear-sighted witness he spoke faithfully of what he knew, never compromising with evil, or truckling for applause. He was the unswerving opponent of indolence, dishonesty, intemperance, licentiousness, improvidence, and irreligion. The temptations of the streets, the theatre, the gin palace were powerfully exposed. The tricks of trade, the puffing advertisements, the clever adulterations, the white lies, and the sharp practices which are too rampant among us were unsparingly denounced, and there is ample evidence that Mr. Brown's lectures effected a great moral reformation, that many professed Christians who up till that time had "believed in vain" were made ashamed of their inconsistencies, and that outsiders were in some cases led to Christ as their Saviour and Lord, and in others made sober, industrious, and honest men. Such sound, healthy teaching deserves the gratitude of all moralists and Christians.

Mr. Brown's reputation gradually extended beyond Liverpool. He appeared on the platform of the Young Men's Christian Association in London, and there delivered his celebrated lectures on "The Battle of Life" and "Manliness.” In the courses of lectures established by similar associations in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Perth, &c., his name was sure to have a place, and few men have travelled through the length and breadth of Great Britain more extensively than he.

He continued these efforts so long as his strength and the growing demands of his church allowed. But his congregation increased to such an extent that it was found necessary, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, to enlarge his chapel, which now comfortably seats 2,000 persons. The church which enjoys such a ministry as Mr. Brown's cannot be an inactive one. Offshoots from it have been formed into separate and independent congregations. It has now a branch church at St. Helens, another at Widnes, and two preaching-stations in the