Lord, make us ambitious!

It would have been in the late 1880s, when the ministry of C. H. Spurgeon was drawing to a close, that a Dubliner by the name of Hugh Dunlop Brown (1858–1918) attended worship at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle with a few thousand other men and women and children.

As Spurgeon came to preach he caught sight of Brown in the congregation and immediately exclaimed: ‘I see my friend Brown from Dublin; will he please come round and help me.’ One can well imagine that it was a rare occasion for Spurgeon to invite a man out of the vast audiences that attended on his preaching to help him in the pulpit. But then Hugh Brown was a remarkable man, though I dare say his name has been forgotten a little over a century since his stepping into heaven.

Material wealth & spiritual riches

Hugh Brown came from wealth. His father, also Hugh Brown (d.1882), had founded the department store now known as Brown Thomas with a James Thomas in 1848 on Grafton Street in Dublin. The wealth that accrued to him enabled him to raise his family in comfort. Such wealth has proven to be a snare to many, but Hugh Brown and his wife Marianne (d.1912) were evangelical Christians, faithful members of the Church of Ireland, and sought to use their wealth for the advance of God’s kingdom.