instituted the 'Bible Reading and Prayer Union' (1892); the 'English Land Colonisation Society,' 1892 (now the 'Co-operative Small Holders Association'); the Boys' (1900) and Girls' (1903) Life Brigades; the Young Men's and Young Women's Brigade of Service (1905); and the Boys' and Girls' League of Honour (1906). He was president of the Licensing Laws Information Bureau (1898-1902), and vice-president of the British Institute for Social Service (1904), and of the British and Foreign Bible Society (1907).
Paton, in conjunction with Dale, edited (1858-61) 'The Eclectic Review.' With F. S. Williams, his colleague, he edited a 'Home Mission and Tract Series' (1865). He was a consulting editor (1882–8) of the 'Contemporary Review,' to which, at his urgent request, Lightfoot previously contributed (1874–7) his articles on 'Supernatural Religion' (Marchant, p. 76). In conjunction with Sir Percy William Bunting [q. v. Suppl. II], editor of the 'Contemporary Review,' and the Rev. Alfred Ernest Garvie, he edited a series of papers entitled 'Christ and Civilisation' (1910), his last work.
He died at Nottingham on 26 Jan. 1911, and was buried in the general cemetery, where the service at the graveside (after a nonconformist service in Castlegate chapel) was conducted by the bishop of Hereford (Percival) and the dean of Norwich (Wakefield), now bishop of Birmingham. He married Jessie, daughter of William P. Paton of Glasgow, and was survived by three sons and two daughters; his son, John Lewis, is high master of the Manchester grammar school.
James Marchant, Paton's biographer, gives a bibliography of his publications to 1909, including leaflets. Among them may be noted: 1. 'The Origin of the Priesthood in the Christian Church,' 1877. 2. 'Christianity and the Wellbeing of the People. The Inner Mission of Germany,' 1885; 2nd edit. 1900. 3. 'The Two-fold Alternative . . . Materialism or Religion ... a Priestly Caste or a Christian Brotherhood,' 1889; 4th edit. 1909. 4. 'Criticisms and Essays,' vol. i. 1895; vol. ii. 1897. 5. 'Christ's Miracle of To-day,' 1905. 6. 'The Life, Faith and Prayer of the Church,' 1909, 16mo (four sermons). 7. 'Present Remedies for Unemployment,' 1909.
[James Marchant, J. B. Paton, 1909 (two portraits and autobiographical fragment); University of London General Register, 1860; W. J. Addison, Roll of Graduates, Glasgow, 1898; Who's Who, 1911; The Times, 27 and 30 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1911; R. Cochrane's Beneficent and Useful Lives, 1890, pp. 146-159 (for account of the National Home Reading Union).]
PATON, JOHN GIBSON (1824–1907), missionary to the New Hebrides, born on 24 May 1824 at Braehead, Kirkmahoe, Dumfriesshire, was eldest of the eleven children (five sons and six daughters) of James Paton, a peasant stocking-maker, by his wife Janet Jardine Rogerson. Both parents were of covenanting stock and
rigid adherents of the 'Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland,' which still represented the faith of the covenanters. When Paton was five years old, the family removed to Torthorwold, a few miles from Dumfries, where his parents passed the remaining forty years of their lives. Here he attended the parish school, till, in his twelfth year, he was put to his father's trade of stocking-making. Paton soon freed himself from the family workshop, and began to support and educate himself. He put himself for six weeks — all he could afford — to Dumfries Academy; he served under the surveyors for the ordnance map of Dumfries; he hired himself at the fair as a farm labourer ; he taught, when he could get opportunity, in schools, and even for a time set up a school for himself ; but every spare moment was devoted to serious study. At last he settled down for ten years as a city missionary in a then very neglected part of Glasgow, where he created an excellent school and put the whole district in order.
The 'Reformed Church,' by which John Paton was ordained, had already a single missionary, the Rev. John Inglis, at Aneityum, the southernmost of the New Hebrides Islands in the South Seas; and the elders of the church were seeking somewhat vainly for volunteers to join in that hazardous enterprise. Paton offered himself, and was accepted. On 1 Dec. 1857 he was licensed as a preacher, in his thirty-third year, and on 23 March following he was ordained. With his newly married young wife, Mary Ann Robson, he reached the mission station at Aneityum on 30 Aug., and the pair were soon sent on to establish a new station in the island of Tanna, the natives of which were then entirely untouched by Western civilisation, except in so far as they had from time to time been irritated by aggression on the part of sandalwood traders. The young Scotchman and his wife, without any experience
