JAMES BALDWIN BROWN.
THE death of James Baldwin Brown is the loss of one whom it will be almost impossible to replace. He leaves behind him colleagues who exercise perhaps as large and liberal an influence as his over the world of Nonconformist thought, colleagues who will speak with all the power with which he spoke against the tyranny of dogmatic trust-deeds and the keeping of souls in mortmain by tying pastors down to the exposition of particular doctrinal. systems. But we doubt whether Mr. Bald- win Brown has left one behind him who will exercise over the Nonconformist body to which he belonged the same refining and gpiritualising influence which was exerted by him throughout the whole of his career. His was above everything a devotional influence, but there was nothing in his devotional manner of that familiarity, or that smartness which is so often associated with popular preaching. Mr. Baldwin Brown exerted a refining influ- ence,—a truly civilising influence, in the moral as well as the popular sense of that word. Those who attended him could not fail to trust him not merely for enforcing on them what they knew to be right, but for making them see a new com- plexity and finer shades in the constitution of the right. Mr. Baldwin Brown was one who opened the minds of his hearers to the subtler threads in the moral and religious constitution of man. He warned his people against the coarseness of much which passes for religion, against the blundering injustice of much which passes for morality. A Christian preacher, if ever there was one, he was singularly alive to the delicacy and tenderness in Christ's teaching, and gave to the theology and spiritual teaching of the Independent body a richer and gentler tone than any other of its most eminent pastors. For example, he warned his people most solemnly against forcing the religious and moral life of their children, so as to develope scrupulosity and anxiety at _too early an age. "There are parents," he said, "who can- not be satisfied unless they flash the light at once, in all its brightness, on the young child's heart, and teach the little ones to mimic the functions and to touch the burdens which will one day try to the utmost their manly and womanly strength. The result of the process is those ministering angels with the wings off, whom American writers first palmed upon us as human children." Again, Mr. Baldwin Brown warned his people against that sickly tendency to dilute. amusement till it becomes "recreation and water," as he expressed it, which is so common in families which have inherited the Puritan traditions. "It generally happens that the form of amusement which is allowed in strict families,' while following the world up to a certain point, stops short when the real power of recreation,— that is, the power of giving a joyful play to the faculties,— begins. It is recreation-aud-water, and that so weak, that all stimulating and reinvigorating power is lost." Again, he warned his people against that tendency to pious talk which so often degenerates into affectation and falsehood. "Pious talk," he said, "from lips or from books, has done its utmost to mar the witness of pious life." And this kind of counsel, we should remember, was not the counsel of one who was in any sense disposed to rationalise, to find out that the Christian revelation was little more than the teaching of nature in its most attractive form, or to minimise the difference between the spiritual man and the natural man. Mr. Baldwin Brown was as sincere a believer as Mr. Spurgeon,— we do not say as orthodox, in the old Nonconformist sense of that word, because it is obvious enough that he was saturated with the Maurician type of faith, and did not keep to the old hard- and-fast lines of Puritan teaching,—but as truly a worshipper of Christ, and as profound a believer in the historical truth of the Gospel. Thus every warning which Mr. Baldwin Brown gave against the ponderous armour with which the old Puri- tan orthodoxy oppressed and bore down the spirit of those who were persuaded to put it on, was given in genuine zeal for Christianity, not in the attenuating spirit of a sceptic. It was as a hearty and most earnest Christian that Mr. Baldwin Brown spoke when he represented the danger of pressing formal religion on children too early, when he pleaded for generous and honest recreation, or when he warned his hearers of the inanities of "pious talk." All that he said was full alike of sense and sensibility, of sound judgment, tender feeling, and deep faith. It is rarely that a man with a spirit so finely tempered as his occupies the position which he occupied, and still more rarely that when he does so, he is found to yield as little as Mr. Baldwin Brown yielded to the views and expectations of those who are addressed by him. In Mr. Baldwin Brown, Nonconformity has lost one of its noblest leaders, and Nonconformists and Churchmen alike one of their wisest and largest-minded counsellors.
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