[2] His education had made him a believer in deism, and he had earlier resisted the wishes of his great-uncle, Sir Robert Pollock, to become a minister in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, the Scottish branch of the Anglican Communion.
On 15 January 1852 he married Laura Isabella Ansley of Bath, Somerset, in Margate, Kent.
Laura died in 1854, and Forlong remarried, on 9 June 1857, to Elizabeth Anna Houlton, in Paddington, London.
[5] Forlong moved back to London around 1863,[2] and around 1868 he founded Talbot Tabernacle in Notting Hill, where he remained until emigrating to New Zealand in 1876.
From 1880 to 1883, he moved to Dunedin and held revival meetings at the Great King Street Congregational Church and in the Queen's Theatre.