Nicely-browned – A Review of Archibald G. Brown: Spurgeon’s Successor by Jeremy Walker

Charles Spurgeon was not the only man of God to be labouring during the heyday of the gospel’s progress in Victorian London. On the other side of the river lived and worked that most excellent servant of Christ, Archibald Geikie Brown. He is the subject of Iain H. Murray’s fairly recent biography, Archibald G. Brown: Spurgeon’s Successor.¹

In some senses the subtitle is a little misleading, for Brown – though also a student of the older man – was in many senses and for many years a co-labourer with Spurgeon, manifesting much of the same spirit and much of the same Spirit, if I might put it so. Brown did, for a brief time, though not immediately, follow Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, but he stands in his own right as a man worthy of our attention. (Indeed, the esteem in which a man as gifted and gracious as Brown held Spurgeon only casts an additional lustre on the greater man: we are tempted to say, ‘If this is the five-talent man, what must have been the man of ten talents!’ Any illusions as to our own status and competence take a healthy battering in the process.)

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A splendid companion volume to the biography would be a small collection of AGB’s sermons, The Face of Jesus Christ: The Person and Work of our Lord.² I have a soft spot for such addresses: as a counterpoint to the kind of expository series which are often lauded today almost to the exclusion of other kinds of preaching, Brown – like Spurgeon – models another expository approach. I am aware that there are times when they go a little off-beam, but these men had a gift to take a short passage of Scripture, sometimes a verse or even a portion of a verse, and – without neglecting a proper awareness of its context and taking legitimate account of the proper sense of the words – to turn the Scripture jewel in gospel light, providing a rich, inventive, Christ-soaked, closely-applied discourse which stirs the soul. Brown’s sermons – see also the recently published This God Our God³ – hit home with that sweet strength that does the soul so much good. I would recommend them to any believer desiring a dose of light and heat, and also to those with an appetite for the truth sufficient to carry them into such pages.