THE project of a free Anglican Church is viewed with various feelings of hope and apprehension by various sections of the ecclesiastical community. "Loose the Church from its fetters," say one party, "and the scandals which deface it will be at an end; it will excommunicate the rationalists, mend the rubrics, and abolish simony." "Cut the Church from its moorings," say another party, "and it will drift inevitably into Ultramontanism; it will impede rather than help the moral progress of the nation: liberty of thought will become impossible within its pale." The interest which the question has for all parties is increased by the probable nearness of its transfer from the region of speculation to that of practical legislation. One of the component parts of the "United Church of England and Ireland" is threatened with speedy and compulsory "freedom;" and to its members, at any rate, the disunion must turn not so much upon the abstract expediency or inexpediency of freedom, as upon the manner which the advantages of such a state, if any, can be best secured, and its risks, if any, best avoided. Meanwhile an example exists ready to hand. In Canada-and to a less extent in some other colonies-the freedom of the No. 108.-VOL. XVIII.

Anglican Church is, or is assumed to be, a realized fact. It is therefore worth while to study it. The conditions of a Colonial society are not so different from our own as to render the example valueless.

I propose in the present paper both to show by what steps this state of freedom was reached, and to point out some of its effects-first, upon the material welfare of the Church; and secondly, upon its efficiency as a religious body.

I. Canada, up to the time of the conquest, was inhabited almost exclusively by French Catholics. The Gallican Church was as firmly established at Quebec as at Paris. Nor was its status materially altered by the conquest. One of the articles of the capitulation of Montreal, in 1760, was to the effect that the free exercise of the "Catholic Apostolic Roman religion" should be guaranteed, and the guarantee was faithfully kept. At a time when the penal laws against Roman Catholics were yet unrepealed in England, the unreformed faith was not merely tolerated, but virtually established in an English colony. This is the more remarkable, as there appears to have been, apart from the stipulation of the treaty, no urgent necessity for it. So strong was the idea of a State Church

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in the minds of the French Canadians, and so feeble their sense of the doctrinal differences between the Church of England and the Church of France, that a Canadian Attorney-General gave evidence before the House of Commons, a few years later, to the effect that, if Protestant rectors had been appointed to fill the vacancies as they occurred in the several parishes, there would have been for the most part a silent acquiescence in the change. But the opportunity soon slipped away, and the Act of 1774 (14 Geo. III. c. 83), commonly called the "Quebec Act," confirmed the establishment of Catholicism, with merely a saving clause in favour of the right of the Crown to take steps, in certain contingencies, for the "encouragement" of Protestantism. The exaggeration was rather on the side of fervour than on that of truth when John Wilkes described the Act as "establishing "French tyranny and the Romish religion in their most abhorred extent." But the ecclesiastical arrangements of the Act were, in fact, not inequitable, and might serve as a useful precedent elsewhere. Tithes were to be paid and the King's supremacy recognised by all classes of subjects, but the tithes paid by Protestants were to be at the disposal of the Government, instead of going to support the (Gallican) rector of the parish. The contingency, however, which had been thus provided for came to pass sooner than had been expected. The American War of Independence drove a large number of loyal men across the St. Lawrence; and the long strip of fertile land, since known as Upper Canada, began to receive its first European population, who were, for the most part, not only Protestants, but members of the Church of England. These U. E. (United Empire) Loyalists, as they were called, had sacrificed so much for "Church and King" that the English Government was justified in making special provision for both their temporal and their spiritual wants. Free grants of land were authorized to be made to them; and since the tithes of an impoverished and thinly-scattered

population of new settlers were insufficient for the purpose, similar grants were also made for the support of a few Anglican clergy.

But the Act of 1774 broke down with the weight of its own political injustice, and the "Constitutional Act" of 1791 (31 Geo. III. c. 31) took its place. The object of this Act was not merely to substitute a constitutional government for one in which the legis lative and executive functions were combined in a virtually irresponsible council, but also to recognise the fact that Canada east and west of the Ottawa was inhabited by two populations who differed widely in race, in laws, and in religion. But to have proposed explicitly a division of the soil between the Churches of England and Rome would, in the prevailing temper of the English Parliament, have been fatal to the bill. Consequently, in Lower Canada, there was virtually a joint establishment of both Churches, or rather, the Church of England was admitted to the greater part of the privileges which the Act of 1774 had confirmed to the Church of Rome. In the comparatively virgin soil of Upper Canada the Church of England reigned supreme. In both provinces alike, tithes were payable by all Protestants to its clergy. A seventh part of all lands that should be henceforth granted to settlers was appropriated for the support of its worship. The King was empowered to authorize the Governor "to constitute and erect within

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every township or parish which is or 'may hereafter be formed, constituted, or erected within such province, one or more parsonage or rectory, according "to the Establishment of the Church of "England." The Bishops of Quebec, the first of whom was sent out in 1793, were nominated and paid by the English Government. Prayers from the English Liturgy were read before the daily sitting of the Provincial Parliaments. And even long afterwards, the universities which were established by the Government were to have for their Visitors the Anglican bishop of the diocese in which