IRVING, EDWARD (1792–1834), was a controversial Scottish minister associated with the founding of the Catholic Apostolic church. Born in Annan, Dumfriesshire, Irving was educated at the University of Edinburgh. After serving as a schoolmaster at Haddington in 1810 and Kirkcaldy in 1812, he was licensed to preach in the Church of Scotland in 1815. He became Thomas Chalmers's assistant at Saint John's, Glasgow, in 1819 but left Scotland in 1822 to become pastor of Caledonian Chapel, a small, struggling congregation in Hatton Garden, London. His dynamic preaching drew such large crowds that a new church had to be built at Regent Square in 1827.

Avowal of controversial doctrines soon undercut Irving's popularity. In the mid-1820s, Irving became a millenarian through the influence of James Hatley Frere, Henry Drummond, and Drummond's Albury Circle. He published Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed of God (1826), in which he predicted the second coming of Christ in 1864; translated The...