use every lawful means, on
all occasions, to advance those civil and religious interests which
I am most fully convinced are essential to the happy preservation
of a prosperous British Government in this country, and to the
happiness and welfare of the great body of Her Majesty's Canadian
subjects.

In order to insure the assent of Her Majesty to the Bill which had been
sent to the Colonial Secretary by Sir George Arthur, the authorities of
the Church of England in the Province circulated a petition for
presentation to the Queen and the British Parliament[105] containing the
following statement and request:--

"Your petitioners, consisting of the United Empire Loyalists and
their children, took refuge in this Province after the American
Revolution, under the impression that they possessed the same
constitution as that of the Mother Country, which includes a
decent provision for the administration of the Word and Sacraments
according to the forms of the Church of England."

The prayer of the petition was--

That the proceeds of the clergy reserve lands be applied to the
maintenance of such clergy, and of a bishop to superintend the
same, so that the ministrations of our Holy Religion may be
afforded without charge[106] to the inhabitants of every township
in the Province.

Dr. Ryerson, having with difficulty procured a copy of this petition,
pointed out in the _Guardian_ of July 3rd, 1839: 1st. Its historical
misstatements, and denounced the selfish and exclusive character of its
demands. He showed in effect that the Province was settled in 1783,
whereas the constitutional Act (which was invoked as though it had
existed long before that date), was not passed until 1791--eight years
after "the United Empire Loyalists and their children took refuge in
Upper Canada." 2nd. That for forty years and more, nine-tenths of the
United Empire Loyalists and their descendants, with all their
"impressions," might have perished in heathen ignorance had not some
other than the Episcopal clergy cared for their spiritual interests; and
that after these forty years of slumbering and neglect, and after the
incorporation of the great body of the old Loyalists and their
descendants into other churches, the Episcopal clergy came in, and now
seek, on the strength of these apocryphal "impressions" (which never
could have existed), to claim one-seventh of the l