s 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 {47} 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."[48]
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.[49]

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