er pules, or whines, or moons,
or shouts to the rafters, or is gifted with the eloquence to touch "the
quick and the dead"; whether the music be a symphony or a dolorous
horror of discords; whether there be social service or old-fashioned
theology; whether, in fact, the preacher be some raw ignorant stripling
from the theological seminary, or a man of divine inspiration and
power--whatever is or is not, if the church is a church, from Halifax
to Vancouver, you find it full. I have no explanation of this fact. I
set it down. Canadians are a vigorously virile people in their
church-going. They do it with all their might. I sometimes think that
the church does for Canada what music does for continental nations,
what dollar-chasing and amusement do for the American nation--opens
that great emotional outlet for the play of spiritual powers and
idealization, which we must all have if we would rise above the
gin-horse haltered to the wheel of toil. "The Happy Warrior" in Watts'
picture dreamed of the spirit face above him in his sleep. So may
Canada dream in her tireless urgent business of nation-making; and
religion may visualize that dream through the church.

Understand--the Canadian is no more religious than the American or the
Britisher. He drinks as much whisky as they do light wines and beer.
He "cusses" in the same unholy vernacular, only more vigorously. He
strikes back as quickly. He hits as hard. He gives his enemy one
cheek and then the other, and then both feet and fists; but the
Canadian goes to church. One of the most amazing sights of the new
frontier cities is to see a church debouching of a Sunday night. The
people come out in black floods. In one foreign church in Winnipeg is
a membership of four thousand. I think of a little industrial city of
Ontario where there is a church--one of three--with a larger membership
than any single church in the city of New York.

Canadians not only go to church but they dig down in their pockets for
the church. In little frontier cities of the West more is being spent
on magnificent temples of worship than has been spent on some European
cathedrals. Granted the effects are sometimes garish and squarish and
dollar-loud. This is not an age when artisans spend a lifetime carving
a single door or a single facade; but when a little place--of say
seventeen thousand people--spends one hundred thousand dollars on a
church, somebody has laid down the cash; and the