8. It is now quite sixty years since Upper Canada
was formed into a province with a representative government. Its
population was then 7,000 souls; it is now about 700,000. During the
first and most eventful half of that sixty years, the ministrations of
the Churches of England and Scotland can scarcely be said to have had an
existence there. The present Bishop of Toronto, in a discourse published
on the occasion of the death of the first Canadian Bishop of the Church
of England, states that down to the close of the war between Great
Britain and the United States in 1815, there were but four resident
clergymen or missionaries of the Church of England in all Upper
Canada--a statement which is confirmed by the annual reports of the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; and the same
reports will show how few were the clergy of the Church of England in
that province down to a recent period. We learn from the same authority,
that till 1818 there was but one clergyman of the Church of Scotland in
Upper Canada, and that in 1827 there were but two. It is, therefore,
clear that during the first half of its sixty years' existence as a
province, Upper Canada must have been indebted almost entirely to other
than clergy of the Churches of England and Scotland for religious
instruction; yet during that thirty years, it is admitted that the
people of Upper Canada were a religious, an intelligent, and loyal
people. To whom the people of that province were mainly indebted for
their religious instruction, and for the formation and development of
their religious character, appears in a report of a Select Committee of
the Upper Canada House of Assembly, appointed in 1828, on the religious
condition of the country, and before which fifty witnesses, chiefly
members of the Church of England, were examined. I quote the following
words from the report of that Committee, (which was adopted by the
Assembly by a majority of 22 to 8), a report which was partly prepared
in reference to a letter addressed by the present Bishop of Toronto to
His Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1827:--

The insinuations (says the report) in the letter against the
Methodist clergymen, the committee have noticed with peculiar
regret. To the disinterested and indefatigable exertions of these
pious men this province owes much. At an early period of its
history, when it was thinly settled, and destitute of all o