Francis Garden (theologian)

Francis Garden FRSE (1810–1884) was a Scottish theologian and religious author. When in England he generally served in the Anglican church, but in Scotland he served in the Episcopalian church.

He was born on 10 December 1810, the son of Alexander Garden (b.1786), a Glasgow merchant, and Rebecca, daughter of Robert Menteith, esq., of Carstairs. They stayed at 110 Argyll Street. After home-tutoring he attended Glasgow University from whence he passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree of B.A. in 1833 and M.A. in 1836. In 1833 he obtained the Hulsean prize for an essay on the ‘Advantages accruing from Christianity.’

At Cambridge he belonged to the set of which Richard Chenevix Trench, F. D. Maurice, and John Sterling were among the leaders, whose intimate friendship, together with that of Edmund Lushington and George Stovin Venables, he enjoyed. His name occurs frequently in Trench's early letters (Memorials, i. 118, 182, 186, 236, &c.), and he was Trench's companion in Rome and its environs in January 1835.

He was consecrated as a priest in 1836 and originally served briefly in London , before gaining a post as Curate to Sir Herbert Oakeley at Bocking in Essex. In 1838–9 he was curate to Julius Charles Hare at Hurstmonceaux in Sussex, succeeding after an interval his friend Sterling. There was hardly sufficient sympathy between Garden and Hare for him to stay long as his curate, and he removed in 1839 to the curacy of St James's Church, Piccadilly, from which he became successively the incumbent of Holy Trinity Church, Blackheath Hill (1840–4).

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