72 OUR HYMNS :
born at Shepton Mallet, Somersetshire, about 1680. He studied under the Rev. John Moore, of Bridgewater. He began to preach before he was twenty years of age, and was soon settled as the minister of a good congregation at Portsmouth. In 1716, he became pastor of the Independent Church in Old Jewry, London.
Seven years from that time he was afflicted with a singular malady. He imagined that God had in a gradual manner anni hilated in him the thinking substance, and utterly divested him of consciousness. It was supposed by some that this condition of mental aberration had its origin in the distress he experienced on finding that he had been unwittingly the cause of the death of a highwayman. Being attacked by one of these ruffians, a struggle ensued in which he overcame his adversary, but on relinquishing his grasp and rising from the ground, he found to his great dis tress that the highwayman was dead. He was also greatly dis tressed by the loss of his wife and only son in the same year, 1723. In his mental distress Mr. Browne felt a strong propensity to destroy himself; and strange as his notion was concerning himself, he felt it peculiarly painful to be contradicted with regard to it. While in this state, he wrote a work in defence of Christianity, and a work on the Trinity, compiled a dictionary, and prepared the exposition on the first epistle to the Corinthians in the continuation of Matthew Henry s Commentary; yet he still maintained that he had no power to think He died in 1732. The " Protestant Dissenters Magazine" of 1797 names twenty- three separate publications from his pen.
His hymn-book was entitled, " Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in three books, designed as a supplement to Dr. Watts."
The preface is interesting in the history of hymnology. It gives some account of the earlier hymn writers.
The first edition was published in 1720, the second in 1741, and the third in 1760. He also wrote some of the tunes prefixed to his book. His hymns have not much poetical beauty, but they are free from blemishes, and are never below respectable mediocrity.
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