George Dawson's father, Jonathan Dawson, conducted what was then known as " a high-class academy "—we should call it a good private school, —and for more than thirty years he prospered in his calling. He was a Baptist, a man of simple faith and simple life. It was natural that the son should be brought up in his father's school, and he remained there till he was sixteen. It was natural, too, that he should be drawn into the Baptist ministry, for seventy years ago there were few other callings open to the son of a Nonconformist who loved books and all that books stand for. So, Oxford and Cambridge being closed to him as a Nonconformist, Dawson went North, entered the University of Aberdeen, and then, a year later, transferred himself to Glasgow where he spent three years, 1838-41, graduating with honours at the close of his course. Then, for the best part of two years, he served in his father's school as an assistant master "usher" they would have called it then. During that time he preached occasionally in various Baptist meeting-houses, and among others in a little chapel at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire. In 1843 he was invited to become its pastor, and accepted the invitation. He was never ordained to the ministry, and he never took any systematic course in theology as a preparation for it two facts worth remembering, for the second, at any rate, throws some light on his later history. At Rickmansworth he spent only a few months, for on August 4, 1844, he preached his first sermon in Mount Zion Chapel, Graham Street, afterwards to be associated with the work and memory of Charles Vince, the best-beloved, perhaps, of
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