Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Brown, Hugh Stowell
BROWN, The Rev. Hugh Stowell, born in Douglas, Isle of Man, in 1823, is the son of a clergyman of the Established Church and cousin of the Rev. Hugh Stowell, of Manchester. He was educated partly at home and partly at the Douglas Grammar School, until he reached the age of fifteen, when he came to England to learn land-surveying. After spending about two years in mastering that business, his views underwent a change, and he repaired to Wolverton, for the purpose of learning the profession of an engineer. This occupation he followed until he came of age, and he drove a locomotive engine on the London and North-Western Railway for six months. It was his custom, after his day's work at Wolverton was done, to spend four or five hours in hard reading; and his first Greek exercises were written with a piece of chalk inside the fire-box of a locomotive engine. Resolving to become a clergyman of the Church of England, he entered as a student at King's College, Castletown, in his native island, and studied there for three years. Doubts, however, came over his mind respecting the truth of the doctrines in the Liturgy and Occasional Services and Catechism of the Church of England. These doubts ultimately produced in his mind the conviction that the baptismal doctrines of the Establishment were at variance with Holy Scripture, and he became a member of the Baptist denomination. He was appointed minister of Myrtle Street Chapel, Liverpool, in Jan., 1848, and soon became one of the recognised leaders of the Baptist body there and throughout the country. As a lecturer to the working classes he is so successful that he collects an audience of between 2,000 and 3,000 artisans on Sunday afternoons, and from 15,000 to 25,000 copies of his lectures are sold. He has lectured frequently on various topics in most of the large towns in Great Britain and Ireland, and in not a few in the United States and in the Dominion of Canada.