in the province, and gave at once continuity, guidance and energy to its policy. Henceforth his ambition was to make the Church of England dominant as the established church in the country with full control of the vast clergy reserve endowments and of the superior education as well as the government of the province.

A circumstance which afforded some fictitious strength to this ambitious politico-religious policy was the relation of several of the other religious bodies and particularly of the Methodists to the sister or rather parent churches in the United States. These churches had sprung from the American colonies at the era of the Revolution, through the United Empire Loyalist emigration which founded Upper Canada. Methodist preachers, themselves also, almost to a man, of Loyalist sympathies, had followed their people to their new homes in the northern wilderness and had shared all their early privations and trials. But under the Methodist itinerant economy they did not establish a separate church, judging that the work of preaching the gospel was not limited by political boundaries. As the Methodists were the most effectual obstacle in the way of the success of the church policy, their opponents were not slow to attach to them the opprobrium of being republicans, annexationists, and not loyal to the British throne and institutions. The reproach was most unjust, for Canadian Methodism was born out of the great United Empire Loyalist

ANGLICAN ADVANTAGES

movement, and this was quite as true of her first preachers as of her people, except that they had little or no property to lose and were precluded by their clerical profession from taking up arms.

A second circumstance tending in the same direction was the prestige afforded to the English church by its relations to the established church in England. If the relation of Methodism to the parent church in the United States was a disadvantage to Canadian Methodism, the relation of the Anglican church in Canada to the parent Church of England operated to the advantage of the colonial church. It thus secured not only prestige, but also, by the transfer of British law and usage to the new colony, a legal status denied to other bodies of Christians. Under that advantage it even laid claim to be the established church of all the colonies as well as of the parent country. This claim was not made good, as the example of the older American colonies was against it, and as the established Church of Scotland at once put forth a similar claim on the same ground. But both bodies secured in this way rights of property and of the legal performance of ministerial or clerical functions. On the other hand the other denominations could hold no property, and baptisms or marriages performed by their ministers were not recognized in law; and only after a struggle of thirty years were these disabilities removed. The facts thus recited are the key to a large part of the first fifty

years of the history of Upper Canada, and to a good deal which has happened since that time. At first indeed the people were so occupied with their individual struggle in the wilderness for a bare subsistence, that they scarcely noticed the lack of these political rights and privileges. They built their humble places of worship on a site cheerfully offered by one of themselves and accepted and used in simple christian confidence. The question of the legal bearings of baptism was scarcely raised, and as for marriage, while its importance could not be overlooked, they accepted the legal provisions existing, though often at great inconvenience and sacrifice.

During this first period also, the ecclesiastical policy, while it had laid some foundations, had not developed any considerable strength. Neither the clergy reserves nor the educational endowment had as yet become productive of appreciable revenue, and the superior advantages of the Anglican church were as yet imported from the old country rather than acquired here. If the English church was supported by government grants, they were made in England and not in Canada.

But even in these times when the Methodists and others were quietly making the best of their disadvantages, the existence of a spirit of arrogant enmity towards them was manifest not only in social life, but also in the exercise of civil authority in forms which exhibited the persecuting spirit

THE WAR OF 1812

of barbarous ages. The death of Charles Justin McCarthy through the action of the civil authorities at Kingston, was the extreme instance of this. He was the martyr of early Canadian Methodism. But this preliminary period was brought to an end by a convulsion thrust into our history from without. This was the war of 1812-14. With the causes or the events of this war we have nothing to do, except to say that in it the Canadian Methodists abundantly vindicated their loyalty to the British throne and institutions. In the noble rally to drive the invader from our soil they bore a manly part; and while all Canadian hearts were united by the common danger and in the common struggle, no one was found base enough even to whisper a slander against either their loyalty or their courage.

With the close of the war came a new era of political and industrial life to Upper Canada. The wave of imperialism which through the South African war has stirred our own time, is largely sentimental. But it has made us feel that we are not only Canadians but a part of Greater Britain. The wave which followed the war of 1812 was intensely sentimental. It made us feel that we were Canada, a country, able to defend its rights and soil; not a mere outlying territory which our neighbours might covet and take possession of. But that wave was one of great material uplift as well. The expenditure of British money during the war intro

duced an era of prosperity. The desperate struggle with want and sometimes with starvation was over, and the whole population began to feel that our country was a home worth fighting for, dying for, and living for, that it might become still more worthy of our affection. A new public interest was created in all that belonged to the country, and the country began to feel the pulsations of political life. It was such an awakening as in all ages has led nations into larger life and liberty. Nor was Canada alone in feeling the power of this movement. It stirred all western Europe, and it led in England itself to the perfecting of her system of responsible government. In fact, our Canadian movement might in comparison seem to be but an insignificant side current of the great movement of the time. But little as it might appear in the great world's history, it had a distinctive unity and character of its own; and to us it is all-important-it is the foundation history of our own country. It was not entirely an isolated history. It had very definite relations to the greater movement in the older lands, especially in England, as we shall see presently. But the forces by which it was propelled were not extraneous; they arose from within, and out of the facts and conditions which we have already described. It therefore assumed a character distinctively Canadian. It was neither American republicanism nor English chartism, but Canadian reform. It was the movement of the great body of the people of