[1] At the age of twenty-five Mr Collins was ordained an elder in the congregation of the Tron Church, Glasgow, then under the pastoral care of Dr M'Gill.

Thomas Chalmers, as a suitable successor to Dr M'Gill, and greatly aided in the movement which resulted in the appointment by the Town Council of the young minister of Kilmany to the church and parish of the Tron.

To Dr Chalmers, with his keen political and social insight, it belonged to originate methods of civic and Christian economy, and to expound and recommend them.

The fact that he took openly the side of the slaves, and that petitions for emancipation lay in his book shop, alienated some of his business customers, many of whom were largely interested in the West India trade.

[3] Mr Collins, published religious literature by reprinting, in a more accessible form many of the writings of the divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

[3] When the temperance cause found its way to Scotland from the United States in 1829, Mr Collins hailed it, as "throwing a ray of light," to use his own words, upon a dark problem.

He visited, on this errand, many of the towns of Scotland, and even extended his tours to Manchester, Liverpool, and London, in all which places he delivered addresses to large audiences.

[3] After talking with his daughter Collins conceived of his grand enterprise of aiming to provide twenty additional parish churches for Glasgow.

His example stimulated the liberality of those whose incomes were five, ten, twenty fold that of the propounder of the scheme, and the result was that in a few months Mr Collins had obtained, mainly by his own exertions, the sum of; £22,000; and only eight years after he had first mooted his proposal before an incredulous public, he had the happiness of consummating his enterprise by laying the foundation stone of the twentieth church erected under the auspices of the Glasgow Church Building Society.

The metropolis of England did not deem it beneath it to follow in the wake of Presbyterian Glasgow, nor its metropolitan pastor to copy the example of the elder of the Tron.

He laid the foundation stone of the new Church erected for the congregation of Free St John's, then under the pastoral care of Dr Thomas Brown.