The Life of John Brown: With Select Writings

The Life of John Brown is the story of an orphaned shepherd boy who rose to become the revered minister of Haddington in south-east Scotland and the theological professor of his denomination. Though his life’s labours were inextricably linked with one town, the influence of John Brown of Haddington spread worldwide through his writings, especially his Self-Interpreting Bible. This book contains his own account of his life. To this, his youngest son, Dr. William Brown, has added family recollections, letters and some of his father’s choicest short writings.

As he drew near the end of his life, John Brown exclaimed, ‘Oh! What must Christ be in Himself, when He sweetens heaven, sweetens Scriptures, sweetens ordinances, sweetens earth, and sweetens even trials! Oh! What must Christ be in Himself!’ Modern readers will taste some of the same Christ-derived sweetness as they meditate on The Life of John Brown with Select Writings.

About the Author

John Brown: The son of poor parents, who both died in his early youth, John Brown (1722-87) – known as John Brown of Haddington – was born in Abernethy, Perthshire. He had little formal education, and supported himself at various times by working as a shepherd, a pedlar, a soldier (volunteering for the Fife regiment on the government side during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion), and a schoolmaster. Insatiable for knowledge, he taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew – and later Arabic, Syriac, Persian and Ethiopic, as well as the major modern European languages. This self-education secured him acceptance, in lieu of a university degree, for theological training under Ebenezer Erskine and James Fisher for the ministry of the Associate Synod church, and he became the minister of the Haddington (East Lothian) congregation of the Secession Church in 1751. Brown served this congregation for thirty-six years until his death, and was also, from 1767, the Synod’s professor, teaching all its ministerial candidates for the eight or nine weeks each year of their four- or five-year course. Brown crammed about 160 hours of instruction into these weeks, across all the disciplines.

John Brown’s renown is chiefly based on his The Self-Interpreting Bible, originally published in 1778, and to a lesser extent on A Dictionary of the Holy Bible (1769). ‘Brown’s Bible’ has often been reprinted, in America as well as in Britain. Its numerous aids for ‘the poorer and labouring parts of mankind’ included a system of marginal cross-references novel in its extensiveness. This ‘library in one volume’ became as common in Presbyterian homes as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in its Fourfold State.

It could be said that Brown founded a ‘dynasty’, and many of his descendants were to become eminent ministers, scholars and public servants. In 1753 he had married Janet Thomson, with whom he had several children, two of whom, John Brown (of Whitburn) and Ebenezer, survived childhood – both of these following their father into the ministry. After Janet died in 1771, aged thirty-eight, Brown married Violet Croumbie in 1773. They had nine children, five of whom survived childhood, including William, who became secretary of the Scottish Missionary Society and author of a major work on the history of Christian missions, as well as being biographer of his father, and compiler of his literary ‘remains’ (The Life of John Brown with select writings, republished by the Trust in 2004).

John Brown died at the Associate Synod manse, Haddington, on 19 June 1787 after a long period of growing debility. He was buried four days later in Haddington churchyard.

William Brown: William Brown (1783-1863) was the youngest son of John Brown of Haddington (who died when he was only four) and editor of his father’s writings. He studied divinity from 1801 at Selkirk under George Lawson, and also graduated in medicine at Edinburgh. Ordained in the Associate (Burgher) Synod in 1807, he married Isabella Taylor of Prestonpans. He had a great interest in Christian missions, but was frustrated in his intention to serve as a missionary in China. However, he became Secretary of the Scottish Missionary Society and was Superintendent of its training seminary for more than twenty-five years.

Brown’s major literary work was his The History of the Propagation of Christianity among the Heathen since the Reformation, in two volumes (1814). In 1829 he published a slightly abridged edition of Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor. This edition has been republished by the Banner of Truth Trust in the Puritan Paperbacks series (ISBN 978 0 85151 191 7) and is now one of the Trust’s best-selling paperback titles. He also edited his father’s A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, and compiled a memoir of him, which was published, with selected ‘remains’, in 1856 (republished by the Trust in 2004 as The Life of John Brown with select writings).