Page:History of Knox Church Dunedin.djvu/65

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HISTORY OF KNOX CHURCH.
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during bis brief incumbency did good service in forming a congregation. Mr Glasgow was born at Ballymena, Ulster, in 1815. After having attended the Grammar School of bis native district, he entered the Royal Belfast Academy, where he greatly distinguished himself as a diligent and successful scholar. He subsequently became a student of the Royal Belfast College, and took a foremost place in the Mathematical class, then taught by the eminent Professor James Thomson, LL.D. He also gained first honours in Logic, Philosophy, and Elocution. His Hebrew and Theological course he finisbed in Edinburgh, where he enjoyed the prelections of Chalmers and Welsh. He was ordained in 1839 as a preacher in connection with the Irish Presbyterian Church, and after labouring as pastor of a congregation in Belfast for a year or two, he felt constrained to join his brother, the late Dr. Glasgow, as a missionary in India, under the Irish Presbyterian Church Mission. He arrived in India in 1842, and after fourteen years of devoted and arduous labours in the mission field, was compelled by enfeebled health to return to his native country. After a time he made choice of New Zealand as his future home, in hopes that a change of climate would improve his health, and thus enable him again to enter on a field of labour. Mr Glasgow reached Dunedin with his wife and family in November 1861, and having been recognised by the Presbytery, he was engaged to do mission work among the miners and others who had located themselves in Stafford and Walker streets and adjacent parts. He and the congregation which he had succeeded in forming were transferred in May 1862 to the more permanent structure that had been erected in Walker street by the joint efforts of the Deacons' Courts of First Church and Knox Church. Here Mr Glasgow did valuable work as long as the state of his health permitted, but he was called away from his earthly labours in March 1863, at the early age of forty-eight. It is recorded of him that "he was a man of genuine piety, and of upright and honourable feeling; that his faith never swerved, and that he cultivated the religion, not of noise, but of a meek and quiet spirit." He left a widow and four children to mourn his loss. Mrs Glasgow and members of her family have been connected with Knox Church for very many years. Ample testimony is borne in this History and in the Annual Reports of the congregation to the many valuable services rendered by that lady and her elder son and elder daughter to the cause of religion in con-