Hugh Dunlop Brown: The witness and influence of an Irish Baptist [1]
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am working on a longer essay on Hugh Dunlop Brown. This is a taster. The illustration above is of the store that his father founded in 1848 in Dublin and which is still going strong.
After T.T. Shields, the famous Baptist preacher from Toronto, had visited England and Ireland in 1934 in order to be involved in the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of C.H. Spurgeon, he made the following noteworthy comment regarding the Irish Baptists whom he met:
The Baptists of Ireland still believe the Book. The Baptist Union of Ireland still stands where Spurgeon stood … There is much to be said for a militant Protestantism. It is a tonic to work with people who believe something, and who are willing to live, and strive, or to die for what they believe. It has produced a quality in Northern Ireland that is all too rare in our day.[2]
Shields did not probe into the reasons for the confessional stability of the Irish Baptists, but if he had, he might well have mentioned the influence of the ministry of Hugh Dunlop Brown (1858–1918), an influential Dublin pastor who was the founder of what became Irish Baptist College, now based in Moira in Northern Ireland.
Material wealth & spiritual riches
Hugh Brown came from wealth. His father, also Hugh Brown (d.1882), had founded the department store now known as Brown Thomas with a James Thomas in 1848 on Grafton Street in Dublin. The wealth that accrued to him enabled him to raise his family in comfort. Such wealth has proven to be a snare to many, but Hugh Brown and his wife Marianne (d.1912) were evangelical Christians, faithful members of the Church of Ireland, and sought to use their wealth for the advance of God’s kingdom.
For instance, when their son became the pastor of the Baptist congregation that met in Lower Abbey Street, Dublin, and whose origins stretched back to the seventeenth century, it soon became evident to Hugh Dunlop Brown that the church needed a new building. His widowed mother, Marianne, generously paid for the entire cost of the new building on Harcourt Street, which was between seven and eight thousand pounds, a huge sum in those days.[3]
The auditorium of the new church could seat up to a thousand people. To the amazement of many in Dublin, and even to the thirty-eight men and women who were the members of the church when it moved to Harcourt Street in 1887, hundreds soon came to hear the young preacher in his mid-twenties. By the close of 1887, the membership of the church had increased to 135, and seven years later, it stood at 380. Seventeen years later, in 1904, the membership was over 400, where it remained to the end of Brown’s ministry in 1914.[4]
Witness to the Word
Brown was a close friend of C.H. Spurgeon during the desperate days of the Downgrade Controversy over the Scriptures in the 1880s. Like Spurgeon, Brown had a profound commitment to the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Bible. A dozen years after Spurgeon’s death, Brown published a book on this key subject. As he noted:
Beyond all doubt, the great battle of the twentieth century must rage around the Inspiration of the Word of God. Has the Almighty really spoken to erring mortals? Or are we mere derelicts, tossed to and fro upon the ocean of life’s enigmas, without a chart or compass? Beside this issue, all other questions, how ever important, dwarf into comparative insignificance. For if the Bible goes, all vanishes; our preaching is vain, our faith is also vain, we are yet in our sins.[5]
Patent throughout the book, which runs to nearly 400 pages, is Brown’s conviction that the embrace of views that undermine confidence in the divine authorship of the Scriptures is a direct rejection of the authority of Christ, who “never fails to express unstaggering belief” in the Old Testament.[6] To accept any other view, Brown asserted, is to cast
a direct vote of censure upon the claims and utterances of our Divine Redeemer Himself. “Aut Christus aut nullus”[7] must therefore in the present conflict be the war-cry and rallying-point of all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth.[8]
Brown’s trust in the Scriptures bore a rich fruit, not only in his own day, but also down through the years, as the opening quote from Spurgeon attests.
[1] For a small biography of Brown, see L[ouis] E. Deens, Man of Stature: Hugh D. Brown, Baptist Leader in Ireland 1884–1914 (Belfast: Baptist Union of Ireland, 1968).
[2] The Gospel Witness (November 22, 1934): 6. I am indebted to Aaron Dunlop for this reference in a Facebook post.
[3] Deens, Man of Stature, 7.
[4] Deens, Man of Stature, 10.
[5] Hugh D. Brown, God’s Witness to His Word: A Study of the Self-Witness of the Holy Spirit to His Own Writings (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), 2.
[6] Brown, God’s Witness to His Word, 122
[7] Latin for “either Christ or nothing.”
[8] Brown, God’s Witness to His Word, ix.