terprise and industry. It dries up the springs
of the human understanding. To what does Britain owe all her greatness
but to that free range of intellectual exertion which prompted Watt
and Arkwright in their wonderful discoveries, which carried Anson and
Cook round the globe, and which enabled Newton to scale the heavens?
Is the dial to be put back? Must the world once more adopt the
doctrine that the people are made for kings and not kings for the
people? Where will this treason to the British Constitution find the
slightest warrant in the Word of God? We know that power alone
proceeds from God, the very air we breathe is the gift of His bounty,
and whatever public right is exercised from the most obscure elective
franchise to the king upon his throne is derived from Him to
whom we must account for the exercise of it. But does that
accountability take away or lessen the political obligations of
the social compact?--assuredly not."

This style of controversy was typical of the time. Tories drew from
the French Revolution warnings against the heedless march of
democracy. Reformers based arguments on the "glorious revolution of
1688." A bill for the secularization of King's College was denounced
by Bishop Strachan, the stalwart leader of the Anglicans, in language
of extraordinary vehemence. The bill would hold up the Christian
religion to the contempt of wicked men, and overturn the social order
by unsettling property. Placing all forms of error on an equality with
truth, the bill represented a principle "atheistical and monstrous,
destructive of all that was pure and holy in morals and religion." To
find parallels for this madness, the bishop referred to the French
Revolution, when the Christian faith was abjured, and the Goddess of
Reason set up for worship; to pagan Rome, which, to please the natives
she had conquered, "condescended to associate their impure idolatries
with her own."

These writings are quoted not merely as illustrations of extravagance
of language. The language was the natural outcome of an extraordinary
situation. The bishop was not a voice crying in the wilderness; he was
a power in politics as well as in the Church, and had, as executive
councillor, taken an important part in the government of the country.
He was not making extravagant pretensions, but defending a position
actually held by his Church, a position which fell little short of
absolute domination. Religious equality was to be establ