ng class as a sign of democracy and social
inferiority. History repeated itself in Upper Canada. As the Puritans of
New England feared the establishment of an Anglican episcopacy, and used
it to stimulate a feeling against the parent state during the beginnings
of the revolution, so in Upper Canada the dissenting religious bodies
made political capital out of the favouritism shown to the Church of
England in the distribution of the public lands and public patronage.
The Roman Catholics and members of all Protestant sects eventually
demanded the secularisation of the reserves for educational or other
public purposes, or the application of the funds to the use of all
religious creeds. The feeling against that church culminated in 1836,
when Sir John Colborne, then lieutenant-governor, established forty-four
rectories in accordance with a suggestion made by Lord Goderich some
years previously. While the legality of Sir John Colborne's course was
undoubted, it was calculated to create much indignant feeling among the
dissenting bodies, who saw in the establishment of these rectories an
evidence of the intention of the British government to create a state
church so far as practicable by law within the province. This act, so
impolitic at a critical time of political discussion, was an
illustration of the potent influence exercised in the councils of the
government by Archdeacon Strachan, who had come into the province from
Scotland in 1799 as a schoolmaster. He had been brought up in the tenets
of the Presbyterian Church, but some time after his arrival in Canada he
became an ordained minister of the Church of England, in which he rose
step by step to the episcopacy. He became a member of both the executive
and legislative councils in 1816 and 1817, and exercised continuously
until the union of 1841 a singular influence in the government of the
province. He was endowed with that indomitable will, which distinguished
his great countryman, John Knox. His unbending toryism was the natural
outcome of his determination to sustain what he considered the just
rights of his church against the liberalism of her opponents--chiefly
dissenters--who wished to rob her of her clergy reserves and destroy her
influence in education and public affairs generally. This very fidelity
to his church became to some extent her weakness, since it evoked the
bitter hostility of a large body of persons and created the impression
that she was the church of