His father, a popular evangelical preacher, born at Ware, Hertfordshire, on 5 November 1785, commenced preaching in March 1808 under the auspices of the London Itinerant Society, was ordained an independent minister on 21 May 1814, was stationed at Hoddesdon from 1812 to 1815, and at Sawston, near Cambridge, from 1815 to 1818, and was minister of Grove Chapel, Camberwell, Surrey, from 1818 until his death at Camberwell on 3 April 1852.
He was curate of St. Mary, Newington Butts, Surrey, from 1835 till 1837, when he was presented to the living of St. Peter's, Walworth.
He became vicar of Barkway in Hertfordshire in 1838, vicar of Brompton, Middlesex, 17 September 1840, prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral December 1860, rector of Waddingham, Lincolnshire, 6 April 1870, and on 7 June 1872 rector of St. Mary Woolnoth with St. Mary Woolchurch-Haw in the city of London, on the presentation of William Ewart Gladstone, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
[1] Irons's chief work is the Analysis of Human Responsibility, 1869, written at the request of the founders of the Victoria Institute.
There Irons lectured on Darwin's Origin of Species, on Tyndall's Fragments of Science, on Mill's Essay on Theism, and on the Unseen Universe.