Religion

History

As with other young communities, the church and religion had their part to play in the shaping of modern Canada. And yet it would be impossible to attribute to any of the Canadian churches an influence so decisive as that which religion exercised through Presbyterianism in the creation of the Scottish democracy, or through Independency in moulding the New England character. For while the question of a religious establishment proved one of the most exciting issues in politics, influences more truly religious suffered a natural degradation and diminution through their over-close association with secular affairs.

Once again the situation in Lower Canada was simplified by the conditions prevailing among the French Canadians. For Lower Canada was whole-heartedly Catholic, and the Canadian branch of the Roman Church had its eulogy pronounced in no uncertain fashion by the Earl of Durham, who, after praising its tolerant spirit, summed up the services of the priesthood in these terms: “The Catholic priesthood of this Province have, to a remarkable degree, conciliated the good-will of persons of all creeds; and I know of no parochial clergy in the world, whose practice of all the Christian virtues, and zealous discharge of their clerical duties, is more universally admired, and has been productive of more beneficial consequences.

Possessed of incomes sufficient, and even large, according to the notions entertained in the country, and enjoying the advantage of education, they have lived on terms of equality and kindness with the humblest and least instructed inhabitants of the rural districts. Intimately acquainted with the wants and characters of their neighbours, they have been the promoters and dispensers of charity, and the effectual guardians of the morals of the people; and in the general absence of any permanent institutions of civil government, the Catholic Church has presented almost the only semblance of stability and organization, and furnished the only effectual support for civilization and order. The Catholic clergy of Lower Canada are entitled to this expression of my esteem, not only because it is founded on truth, but because a grateful recognition of their eminent services, in resisting the arts of the disaffected, is especially due to them from one who has administered the government of the Province in these troubled times.”

Upper Canada and the British community presented a somewhat different picture. Certain Roman Catholic elements among the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders reinforced the ranks of {43} Catholicism, but for the greater part Anglicanism and Presbyterianism were the ecclesiastical guides of the settlers. At first, apart from official religion, the Church of England appeared in Canada in missionary form, and about 1820 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had fifteen missionaries in Lower Canada, and seventeen in Upper Canada. But under the fostering care of governors like Colborne, and the organizing genius of Dr. Strachan, Rector, Archdeacon, and latterly Bishop in Toronto, the Anglican Church in Canada became a self-dependent unit. The Bishop of Toronto was able to boast in 1842 that in his western visitation, which lasted from June till October, he had “consecrated two churches and one burial ground, confirmed 756 persons at twenty-four different stations, and travelled, including his journeys for the formation of District Branches of the Church Society, upwards of 2,500 miles.”

In cities like Toronto and Kingston it was on the whole the church of the governing class, and shared in the culture and public qualities of that class. Nor was it negligent of the cure of poorer souls, for Anglicans co-operated with Presbyterians in the management of the poor schools in Kingston, and in that and the other more prominent towns of the province, the English parish church system seems to have been transplanted and worked most efficiently. Equal in importance, if not in numbers, Scottish Presbyterianism claimed its section of the community. Down to 1822, there were but six organized congregations in Upper and Lower Canada connected with the Church of Scotland, but at the first Presbyterian Synod held in Canada, in 1831, fourteen ministers and five elders gathered at Kingston to represent the Church; and by 1837 the number of congregations had grown to 37 in Upper Canada, and 14 in Lower Canada. Nor were these weak and struggling efforts.

The Scottish Church at Kingston had in 1841 a membership of 350, and an average attendance of 800. Like its Anglican rival, it was simply a parish church, and its minister, trained in Edinburgh, as the Anglican cleric came naturally from an English college, visited, preached, and disciplined according to the rules of Knox and Melville, and maintained, perhaps more genuinely than either school or newspaper could, an educational influence on his flock not unworthy of the mother country. Here and there the ties, which still remained strong, between Canadian settlements and the districts in Scotland whence the settlers were drawn, proved useful aids in church extension. Lanark, in Upper Canada, owed its church to the efforts of friends in Lanarkshire, in Scotland, who collected no less a sum than £290 for the purpose.

But the religious life of Canada was assisted by another less official force, the Methodist Church. Methodism in its earlier days incurred the reproach of being rather American than British, and, in one of his most unjustifiable perversions of the truth, Strachan tried to make the fact tell against the sect, in his notorious table of ecclesiastical statistics. Undoubtedly there was a stronger American element in the Methodist connection than in either of the other churches; and its spirit lent itself more readily to American innovations. Its fervent methods drew from the ranks of colder churches the more emotional, and being freer and homelier in its ritual, it appealed very directly to a rude and half-educated community. Thus the Methodist preachers made {46} rapid headway, more especially in regions untouched by the official churches.

In the representative man of early Canadian Methodism, Egerton Ryerson, qualities conspicuously British and conservative, appeared. Through him Methodism came forward as the supporter of the British connection in the Metcalfe troubles, as through him it may claim some of the glory of organizing an adequate system of provincial education. But, after all, the noblest work of the sect was done in informal and irregular fashion. They were the pioneers and coureurs du bois of the British province in the religious world. Perhaps the most genuine tribute paid to this earlier phase of Methodism was that of John Beverley Robinson, when his fellow Anglicans blamed him in 1842 for granting a plot of ground for a Methodist chapel. “Frequently,” he retorted, “in the most lonely parts of the wilderness, in townships where a clergyman of the Church of England had never been heard, and probably never seen, I have found the population assembled in some log building, earnestly engaged in acts of devotion, and listening to those doctrines and truths which are inculcated in common by most Christian denominations, but which, if it had not been for the ministration of dissenting preachers, would for thirty years have been but little known, if at all, to the greater part of the inhabitants of the interior of Upper Canada.” Still the Canadian Methodist Church did not occupy so conspicuous a place in the official public life of Canada, and in Sydenham’s Legislative Council of 1841, out of twenty-four members, eight represented Anglicanism, eight Presbyterianism, eight Catholicism, and Methodism had to find lowlier places for its political leaders.

Hitherto religion has been viewed in its social and spiritual aspects. But Canadian history has, with perhaps over-emphasis, selected one great controversy as the central point in the religious life of the province. It is not my intention to enter here into the wearisome details of the Clergy Reserve question. But the fight over the establishment principle forms an essential factor in the social and political life of Canada between 1839 and 1854, the year in which it was finally settled. It is first necessary to discriminate between what may be called casual and incidental support to churches in Canada, and the main Clergy Reserve fund.

When Dr. Black challenged, in the interests of Presbyterianism, certain monies paid to Anglican churches in Upper and Lower Canada, he was able to point to direct assistance given by the Imperial Parliament to the Anglican Church in Canada. He was told in answer that these grants were temporarily made to individuals with whose lives they terminated, and that a pledge had been given in 1832 that Britain should be relieved of such expenses. In a similar fashion, when the district of Perth, in Upper Canada, was settled by discharged soldiers and emigrants from Scotland, “Government offered assistance for the support of a minister, without respect to religious denomination,” and, as a matter of fact, the community thus assisted to a clergyman, received, not a minister of the Church of Scotland, but one ordained by the Secession Church in Scotland—a curious but laudable example of laxity on the part of government.

The root and ground of offending lay in the thirty-sixth and following clauses of the Constitutional Act of 1791, which proposed to support {49} and maintain a Protestant clergy in the provinces by grants of land, equal in value to the seventh part of lands granted for other purposes. On the face of it, and interpreted by the clauses which follow, the Act seems to bear out the Anglican contention that the English Church establishment received an extension to Canada through the Act, and that no other church was expected to receive a share. It is true that the legal decision of 1819, and the views of colonial secretaries like Glenelg, admitted at least the Scottish Church to a portion of the benefits. But for the purposes of the situation in 1839, it is merely necessary to say that a British parliament in 1791, ignorant of actual colonial conditions, and more especially of the curious ecclesiastical developments with which the American colonies had modified the British system before 1776, and probably forgetful of the claims of the Church of Scotland to parliamentary recognition, had given Canada the beginnings of an Anglican Church establishment; and that the Anglicans in Canada, and more especially those led by Dr. John Strachan, had more than fulfilled the sectarian and monopolist intentions of the legislators.

Three schools of opinion formed themselves in the intervening years. First and foremost came the establishment men, mainly Anglican, but with a certain Presbyterian following, who claimed to monopolize the benefits, such as they were, of the Clergy Reserve funds. Canada as a British colony was bound to support the one or two state churches of the mother country; religious inequality was to flourish there as at home; dissent was to receive the same stigma and disqualification, and the dominant church or churches were to live, not by the efforts of their members, but at the expense of all citizens of the state, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, or Methodist. This phase of opinion received its most offensive expression from leaders like the Bishop of Toronto. To these monopolists, any modification of the Anglican settlement seemed a “tyrannical and unjust measure,” and they adopted an ecclesiastical arrogance towards their fellow-Christians, which did much to alienate popular sympathies throughout the province.

At the other extreme was a solid mass of public sentiment which had little interest in the ecclesiastical theories of the Bishop of Toronto, and which resented alike attempts to convert the provincial university into an Anglican college, and the cumbrous and unjust form of church establishment, the most obvious evidence of which lay in the undeveloped patches of Clergy Reserve land scattered everywhere throughout the settlements. It was the undoubted desire of a majority in 1840 that the Clergy Reserve system should be ended, the former reserves sold, and the proceeds applied to educational and general purposes; a desire which had been registered in the House of Assembly on fourteen different occasions since 1826.

The case for the voluntary principle in Canada had many exponents, but these words of Dr. John Rolph in 1836 express the spirit of the movement in both its strength and its weakness: “Instead of making a State provision for any one or more churches; instead of apportioning the Clergy Reserves among them with a view to promoting Christianity; instead of giving pensions and salaries to ministers to make them independent of voluntary contributions from the people, I would studiously avoid that policy, and leave truth unfettered and unimpeded to make her own conquests…. The professions of law and physic are well represented in this Assembly, and bear ample testimony to the generosity of the people towards them. Will good, pious and evangelical ministers of our holy religion be likely to fare worse than the physicians of the body, or the agents for our temporal affairs? Let gospel ministers, as the Scriptures say, live by the gospel, and the apostolic maxim that the workman is worthy of his hire implies the performance of duty rewarded temporarily by those who impose it. There is no fear that the profession will become extinct for want of professors.”

Between the extremes, however, there existed a group of moderate politicians, represented, in the Upper Province by Baldwin, in the Lower by La Fontaine, and among British statesmen apparently by both Sydenham and Elgin. Especially among its Canadian members, this group felt keenly the desirability of supporting religion, as it struggled through the difficulties inevitably connected with early colonial life. But neither Baldwin, who was a devoted Anglican, nor La Fontaine, a faithful son of his Church, showed any tinge of Strachan’s bitterness as they considered the question; and nothing impressed Canadian opinion more than did La Fontaine’s speech, in a later phase of the Clergy Reserve troubles, when he solemnly renounced on behalf of his coreligionists any chance of stealing an advantage while the Protestants were quarrelling, and when he stated his opinion that the endowment belonged to the Protestant clergy, and should be shared equally among them. It was this school of thought—-to anticipate events by a year or two—which received the sanction of Sydenham’s statesmanship, and that energetic mind never accomplished anything more notable than when, in the face of a strong secularizing feeling, to the justification for which he was in no way blind, he repelled the party of monopoly, and yet retained the endowment for the Protestant churches of Canada.

“The Clergy Reserves,” he wrote in a private letter, “have been, and are, the great overwhelming grievance—the root of all the troubles of the province, the cause of the Rebellion—the never-failing watchword at the hustings—the perpetual source of discord, strife, and hatred. Not a man of any party but has told me that the greatest boon which could be conferred on the country would be that they should be swept into the Atlantic, and that nobody should get them. My Bill (that is, his bill for dividing the Reserves in certain proportions among the churches) has gone through the Assembly by a considerable majority, thirty to twenty, and I feel confident that I can get it through the Council without the change of a word. If it is really carried, it is the greatest work that ever has been done in this country, and will be of more solid advantage to it than all the loans and all the troops you can make or send. It is worth ten unions, and was ten times more difficult.”

It is a melancholy comment on the ecclesiastical interpretation of religion that, ten years later, when the firmly expressed desires of all moderate men had given the Bishop of Toronto a good excuse for acquiescence in Sydenham’s status quo, that pugnacious ecclesiastic still fought to save as much of the monopoly as could be secured.

With the Clergy Reserve dispute, the region of politics has been reached; and, after all, politics furnished the most powerful influence in the young Canadian community. But politics must be taken less in the constitutional sense, as has been the custom with Canadian writers, and more in the social and human sense. It is important also to note the broad stretches of Canadian existence into which they hardly intruded. Political questions found few exponents among the pioneers as they cleared the forests, or gathered lumber for the British market, or pushed far to the west and north in pursuit of furs. Even the Rebellion, when news of it reached Strickland and his fellow-settlers in the Peterborough country, came to them less as part of a prolonged struggle in which they all were taking part, than as an abnormal incident, to be ended outright by loyal strength. They hardly seem to have thought that any liberties of theirs were really endangered.

When Mackenzie himself complained that instead of entering Toronto with four or five thousand men, he found himself at the head of a poor two hundred, he does not seem to have realized that, even had his fellow-conspirators not mismanaged things, it would still have been difficult to keep hard-working settlers keyed up to the pitch of revolutionary and abstract doctrines. There must have been many settlers of the temper of the humble Scottish janitor in Queen’s College, Kingston, who wrote, in the midst of the struggle of parties in 1851: “For my part I never trouble my head about one of them. Although the polling-house was just across the street, I never went near it.” In the cities, however, and along the main lines of communication, the interest must have been keen, and the country undoubtedly attained its manhood as it struggled towards the solution of questions like those of the Clergy Reserves, the financing of the colony, the regulation of trade and immigration, and, above all others, the definition of responsible government. (1)

Resources

Notes

1. J. L. Morison, “British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government 1839-1854” (1919), Toronto, S. B. Gundy

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Law is our Passion

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This entry was last updated: October 29, 2016