Article 1

Glasgow Through the Looking Glass. 

 ''Let Glasgow Flourish by the Preaching of the Word."

 The sentence has formed the motto of Glasgow for several hundred years. Few,  however, who hail the expression, blazoned on the city arms are aware how absolutely, and from what a remote era, Glasgow has owed its existence to the offices of religion.

 Before the known history of the British Island began, this neighbourhood appears to have been a great religious centre ; for centuries the growing community which clustered on the sunny hill-side which is now High Street, subsisted solely as a dependency of the religious establishment above ; and for fifteen hundred years every access of dignity attained by the town was owed directly to the cathedral and its bishop. Even in later days, down almost to the beginning of the present century, it was as an ecclesiastical centre that Glasgow figured in the politics of the country. Within recent years, it is true, the growth and fame of the city have been owed chiefly to commerce; but it would be a grave mistake for her citizens to suppose, on that account, that Glasgow was, either in origin or in her most noted annals, a mercantile place.

It is common to ascribe the foundation of Glasgow to Kentigern, the Cymric missionary saint, who made his church here in the second half of the sixth century. But the importance of the neighbourhood as a religious centre dates from a much earlier time.