age, and the protection of the interests of the Church of
England; on the other, a combination of Reformers, chiefly composed of
Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who clamoured for reforms in
government and above all for relief from the dominance of the Anglican
Church, which, with respect to the clergy reserves and other matters,
was seeking a _quasi_ recognition as a state church. As the Puritans
of New England at the commencement of the American Revolution
inveighed against any attempt to establish an Anglican episcopate in
the country as an insidious attack by the monarchy on their civil and
religious liberty--most unjustly, as any impartial historian must now
admit[17]--so in Upper Canada the dissenters made it one of their
strongest grievances that favouritism was shown to the Anglican Church
in the distribution of the public lands and the public patronage, to
the detriment of all other religious bodies in the province. The
bitterness that was evoked on this question had much to do with
bringing about the rebellion of 1837. If the whole question could have
been removed from the arena of political discussion, the Reformers
would have been deprived of one of their most potent agencies to
create a feeling against the "family compact" and the government at
Toronto. But Bishop Strachan, who was a member of both the executive
and legislative councils--in other words, the most influential member
of the "family compact"--could not agree to any compromise which would
conciliate the aggrieved dissenters and at the same time preserve a
large part of the claim made by the Church of England. Such a
compromise in the opinion of this sturdy, obstinate ecclesiastic,
would be nothing else than a sop to his Satanic majesty. It was always
with him a battle _a l'outrance,_ and as we shall soon see, in the end
he suffered the bitterness of defeat.

In these later days when we can review the whole question without any
of the prejudice and passion which embittered the controversy while it
was a burning issue, we can see that the Church of England had strong
historical and legal arguments to justify its claim to the exclusive
use of the clergy reserves. When the Constitutional Act of 1791 was
passed, the only Protestant clergy recognized in British statutes were
those of the Church of England, and, as we shall see later, those of
the established Church of Scotland. The dissenting denominations had
no more a legal status in the con