in the religious life of the
province. It is not my intention to enter here into the wearisome
details of the Clergy Reserve question. But the fight over the
establishment principle forms an essential factor in the social and
political life of Canada between 1839 and 1854, the year in which it
was finally settled. It is first necessary to discriminate between
what may be called casual and incidental support to churches in Canada,
and the main Clergy Reserve {48} fund. When Dr. Black challenged, in
the interests of Presbyterianism, certain monies paid to Anglican
churches in Upper and Lower Canada, he was able to point to direct
assistance given by the Imperial Parliament to the Anglican Church in
Canada. He was told in answer that these grants were temporarily made
to individuals with whose lives they terminated, and that a pledge had
been given in 1832 that Britain should be relieved of such
expenses.[50] In a similar fashion, when the district of Perth, in
Upper Canada, was settled by discharged soldiers and emigrants from
Scotland, "Government offered assistance for the support of a minister,
_without respect to religious denomination_," and, as a matter of fact,
the community thus assisted to a clergyman, received, not a minister of
the Church of Scotland, but one ordained by the Secession Church in
Scotland--a curious but laudable example of laxity on the part of
government.[51]

The root and ground of offending lay in the thirty-sixth and following
clauses of the Constitutional Act of 1791, which proposed to support
{49} and maintain a Protestant clergy in the provinces by grants of
land, equal in value to the seventh part of lands granted for other
purposes. On the face of it, and interpreted by the clauses which
follow, the Act seems to bear out the Anglican contention that the
English Church establishment received an extension to Canada through
the Act, and that no other church was expected to receive a share. It
is true that the legal decision of 1819, and the views of colonial
secretaries like Glenelg, admitted at least the Scottish Church to a
portion of the benefits. But for the purposes of the situation in
1839, it is merely necessary to say that a British parliament in 1791,
ignorant of actual colonial conditions, and more especially of the
curious ecclesiastical developments with which the American colonies
had modified the British system before 1776, and probably forgetful of
the claims of th