Kerr, Joseph, Dd

Kerr, Joseph, D.D., a prominent minister of the Associate Reformed Church, was born in Antrim County, Ireland, in 1778; educated at the University of Glasgow, and, with a view of entering the ministry, pursued theological studies under the direction of the Associate Presbytery of Derry. He came to this country in 1801, and was licensed by the Second Presbytery of Pennsylvania shortly after. His appointment lay over a vast area of country west of the Alleghanies, a work for which he seemed to have been endowed by nature. In 1804 he was called to Mifflin and St. Clair as regular pastor, and, accepting, was installed October 17. When the Presbytery decided to establish a theological school at Pittsburg, they looked to him for its head, and felt constrained to urge his removal to that place, and appointed him professor of theology, a post which he successfully filled until he died, Nov. 15, 1829. " The death of Dr. Kerr shed a gloom not only over the large circle of his friends and acquaintances, and the families of his pastoral charge, but over the entire Synod of the West, as it seemed at once to dash the brightening prospects of the infant theological seminary intrusted to his supervision .... With an athletic physical constitution, of more than ordinarily prepossessing appearance, he was endowed with intellectual powers of the first order, highly cultivated, and possessed of all the essential elements of a natural orator. With undoubted yet unostentatious piety, mild, kind, affable, affectionate, benevolent, liberal, and hospitable almost to a fault, he at once won the friendship and affections of his acquaintances, and the confidence of the congregations to whom he ministered, and, without assuming it, or even being apparently conscious of it, he occupied from the commencement of his ministry the position of a master spirit, which was accordedto him without envy and without opposition by his co-presbyters."-(Wilson, Presb. Historical Almanac, 1863, p. 372 sq.