The Face of Jesus Christ – A Review by Ben Ramsbottom

Until recently the name of Archibald Brown was just a name to us. We must confess, however, how interested we have become in reading his biography¹, and now with pleasure we have read his sermons (twenty-two in the book²), and commend them to our readers. It will be said, ‘There is not the depth that we find in J.C. Philpot and J.K. Popham.’ There certainly is not – either in doctrine or experience. But there is a beauty and an attraction in these sermons.

Though there is a simplicity, yet there is a faithful contending for

• The glory of the Person and finished work of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And Mr. Brown speaks as one who knows and loves him personally.
• The absolute authority and infallibility of Holy Scripture – and this in the face of many attacks from ‘the new theology.’
• An abhorrence of any form of worldliness or lightness in the things of God.

It may be felt that Archibald Brown is a little flowery in some of his expressions, and, though he uses the Authorised Version, he does in places refer to the new Revised Version. But there is the gracious experience. In preaching he often refers to what he himself feels – so different from so many modern preachers. Especially (page 168), preaching in deep sorrow [probably following the death of his wife], he says:

I only wish that it [the text] might come to you with one tithe of the power it came to me. It came to me the other day, or rather, I should say, the other night, in deep depression that I cannot describe. I was sitting alone in a house that has been stripped of everything that made life bright – sitting utterly alone, in a deep depression which, as I say, I cannot describe in words. I sat in a stupor till past the midnight hour, thinking about the past, and about one o’clock in the morning, I mechanically took this Testament in my hand, and opened it without a thought. It opened on this 22nd chapter of Revelation, and my eye fell on two words: ‘I, Jesus.’ They were enough. The darkness vanished . . . Though children die, though wives be cut down, though husbands go to the grave, though fortunes break, though all depart, yet in the darkness, and through the storm, there comes a voice, and it says, ‘I, Jesus – I live still. Whatever else thou mayest have lost, I, Jesus, am with thee yet.’

We commend this book.