Rev. Dr. Edward Marcus Dill

Biography

Edward Marcus Dill helped build a Presbyterian church in Cork, in southern Ireland, before taking his ministry onto the roads of southern Ireland. Installed in Cork in 1838, he served during the construction of the Queen Street church. In 1846 he left the congregation to become a travelling agent of the Presbyterian Home Mission.

Born at Knowehead in County Donegal, northwestern Ireland, on March 7, 1813, Edward was a son of Rev. Richard Dill and Grace Cochrane. He trained in both arts and medicine at Glasgow in Scotland, receiving an MA in 1830 and an MD in 1834. He entered the ministry at Coagh and married Sarah Jane Robinson on August 9, 1837.

Edward and Sarah established industrial schools in County Kerry, in southwestern Ireland, and sold pupils' work to supporters in Ireland and England. In 1848 he travelled to America with the minister Jonathan Simpson; together they raised a reported £5,400 for mission work among people suffering from the famine.

His response to the famine also carried a harsh religious argument. In The Mystery Solved, published in 1852, he interpreted Ireland's suffering as divine correction and presented Protestant conversion as its remedy. His fundraising and schools belonged to the same missionary project as this anti-Catholic polemic. He later served as secretary of the Scottish Reformation Society.

Edward returned to a settled congregation at Clonakilty, in County Cork in southern Ireland, in March 1860. It had grown out of a mission station and had been organized as a congregation the previous November. He was its first minister. A parish anniversary account records a lease between Edward and Lord Viscount Boyle on July 1, 1862 for the ground occupied by the Presbyterian church. The building later became Clonakilty's post office; its former worship space became the public office and its Sunday-school space the sorting office.

Edward died at Fethard on November 23, 1862 and was buried at Clonmel, in County Tipperary in southern Ireland. The Macky family history remembers him also as the uncle who baptized William Marcus Dill Macky.