Volume 1 > Half-Volume 1

185
Epistle of the Apostle Peter. These discourses had
been preached to his congregation, at intervals,
during a period of sixteen years, and were now pub-
lished at their urgent request. Being delivered in
the form of lectures, fashioned upon the old Scottish
model, they may be properly considered as a com-
mentary, where the critical and analytical learning is
subordinated to the popular intelligence and practi-
cal bearing of the expositions. The work was
favourably received both in Britain and America, and
in scholarship alone it rivalled the best commentaries
of the German school of theology, with a more sound
and practical character than they can generally lay
claim to. His next work of importance, also in three
volumes, having for its title, Discourses and Sayings
of our Lord Jesus Christ, Illustrated in a Series of
Expositions, appeared in 1850. His chief aim in
this publication, for the illustration of which hundreds
of volumes in various languages had been consulted,
was to show the pre-eminent place which the person
of Jesus holds in the Christian faith, as opposed to
the rationalists of the age. "A personal deity," he
writes, "is the soul of natural religion; a personal
Saviour, the real living Christ, is the soul of revealed
religion. How strange that it should not be im-
possible�how sad, that through a perverted ingenuity
it should not be uncommon�in reference to both of
these, to convert that into a veil which was meant
to be a revelation." As a sequel to his Discourses
and Sayings of our Lord, Dr. Brown, in 1850, pub-
lished An Exposition of our Lord's Intercessory
Prayer, in one volume. His next work, which
appeared in 1851, was entitled " The Resurrection of
Life, being an exposition in one volume of I Cor. xv."
In 1852 he published his work called The Sufferings
and Glories of the Messiah, and in 1853 appeared his
Exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians. This work,
dedicated to the ministers, preachers, and students
who had studied exegetical theology under his care,
although comprised in a single unpretending volume,
was one of the most carefully laboured of his writings,
114 critical and hermeneutical treatises having been
consulted in the course of its preparation.
As the preceding works, although comprising ten
volumes, had been published within little more than
five years, it was time that their author should rest,
and accordingly three years elapsed before he resumed
his pen. He then, towards the close of 1856, and
when he was seventy-two years old, published his
work entitled Parting Counsels, being an exposition
of 2 Pet. i., to which were added some other dis-
courses of public interest. In the following year, he
published his Analytical Exposition of the Epistle of
Paul to the Romans, a subject which had exercised
his mind for more than forty years, and upon which
a vast amount of learning was concentrated. He
intended to have produced upon this portion of
Scripture an extensive commentary, but feeling the
effects of old age, and the approach of death, was
compelled to forego his design. In stating this, he
adds, "Yet I am unwilling to go hence, without
leaving some traces of the labour I have bestowed
on this master-work of the apostle; without contri-
buting some assistance, however limited, toward the
production of what, whenever produced, will mark
an era in the history of Scriptural exegesis,�a com-
plete exposition of the Epistle to the Romans. For-
bidden to build the temple, I would yet do what I
can to furnish materials to him who shall be honoured
to raise it." His contribution in this case was a
valuable volume of more than 600 pages. One work
yet remained, an Exposition of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, which he had prepared for the press, but
did not live to publish.
While the last years of Dr. Brown were thus spent
in a round of ceaseless activity, in which the duties
of minister, professor, and author were so faithfully
discharged, the esteem which he had won from the
world at large was emphatically expressed when the
fiftieth anniversary of his ministry had arrived.
This was on the 6th of February, 1856, and on the
8th of April the event was celebrated as a religious
jubilee in his church of Broughton Place, and in the
evening in Tanfield hall. The addresses delivered
by the chief ministers of his own and other religious
denominations bore striking testimony to his worth
and the high appreciation of his character, while not
the least eloquent was a gift of �610 presented to him
by his congregation as a token of their esteem and
gratitude. Although Dr. Brown had never at any
time been rich, he devoted the whole of this sum,
with an additional donation of .�50 from his own
pocket, towards the formation of a fund for the relief
of aged and impoverished ministers. In 1857 his
increasing debility obliged him to resign his pro-
fessorship, and in the following year his ministerial
charge, after which he patiently awaited that solemn
change from time to eternity for which his whole life
had been a preparation. On the I3th of October,
1858, he passed away so gently that it seemed the
tranquil act of falling asleep, after he had expressed
his joyful hopes of immortality, and bid his sorrow-
ing friends farewell. A week after, his remains were
interred in the New Calton burying-ground; and the
funeral, which was attended by ministers of various
denominations, and a concourse of mourners as such
an occasion had never collected in Edinburgh,
showed the public sense of such a bereavement.
The character of Dr. Brown�his acquirements
and accomplishments as a minister, professor, scholar,
and Christian expositor� can be but faintly under-
stood from this brief sketch of his history. His
eloquence survives, but only in the memory of the
living, while his authorship was of a kind that re-
quires whole years fully to appreciate. But it will
stand the test, and on that account will only be the
more lasting. It is only necessary to add to this
memoir, that Dr. Brown was twice married. His
first wife was Miss Jane Nimmo of Glasgow, who
died in May, 1816. His second wife was Margaret
Fisher Crum, daughter of Alexander Crum, Esq.,
of Thornliebank, near Glasgow, whom he married
after a widowhood of nineteen years, and who died
in 1841.
BROWN, ROBERT, D.C.L. This eminent bo-
tanist, whom his friend Baron Humboldt character-
ized as the "botanicorum facile princeps," was the
son of a Scottish Episcopalian minister, and was
born at Montrose on the 21st of December, 1773.
His education was prosecuted first at the Marischal
College, Aberdeen, and subsequently at the univer-
sity of Edinburgh, where he finished his course of
medical study in 1795, in which year he accompanied
a fencible regiment to Ireland, in the double capacity
of ensign and assistant-surgeon. Near the close of
the eighteenth century he had returned to Edinburgh,
where he published his first scientific paper on the
Asclepiadese in the Transactions of the Wernerian
Society, and on the 2Oth of November, 1798, he
was elected an associate of the Linnsean Society of
London.
The remarkable aptitude of Robert Brown for
botany, and his proficiency in the science, had now
secured for him the lasting friendship of Sir Joseph
Banks, at whose recommendation he was attached in
1801 as naturalist to His Majesty's ship Investigator,
then commissioned under the command of Captain