Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson.

  • John Brown
Date:
[1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Horae subsecivae / by Dr. John Brown, with an introduction by Austin Dobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    open my small fingers ; he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end disappearing in the gloom. My mother’s death was the second epoch in my father’s life ; it marked a change at once and for life ; and for a man so self-reliant, so poised upon a centre of his own, it is wonderful the extent of change it made. He went home, preached her funeral sermon, every one in the church in tears, himself outwardly unmoved^. But from that time dates an entire, though always deepening, alteration in his manner of preaching, be- cause an entire change in his way of dealing with God’s Word. Not that his abiding religious views and con- victions were then originated or even altered—I doubt not that from a child he not only knew the Holy Scriptures, but was ‘ wise unto salvation ’—but it strengthened and clarified, quickened and gave per- manent direction to, his sense of God as revealed in His Word. He took as it were to subsoil ploughing; he got a new and adamantine point to the instrument with which he bored, and with a fresh power—with his whole might, he sunk it right down into the living rock, to the virgin gold. His entire nature had got a shock, and his blood was drawn inwards, his surface was chilled ; but fuel was heaped all the more on the inner fires, and his zeal, that n depfiov npaypa, burned with a new ardour ; indeed had he not found an outlet for his pent-up energy, his brain must have given way, and his faculties either have consumed themselves in wild, wasteful splendour and combustion, or dwindled into lethargy ^ I have been told that once in the course of the sermon his voice trembled, and many feared he was about to break down. ^ There is a story illustrative of this altered manner and matter of preaching. He had been preaching when very young, at Galashiels, and one wife said to her ‘ neebor,’ ‘ Jean, what think ye o’ the lad V ' IVs maist o H tinsel warhy said Jean, neither relishing nor appreciating his fine senti- ments and figures. After my mother’s death, he preached
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