What part does religion play in Canada? In marked distinction to the United Kingdom and the United States, Canada is a church-going nation. You hear a great deal of the orthodoxy of the Britisher; but if you go to England and go to his church, even to a festal service such as Christmas, you will find that he leaves the orthodoxy mostly to the clergy and the women. I have again and again seen the pews of the most famous churches in England with barely a scattering of auditors in them. Of churches where the hard-working manual toiler may be found side by side with the cultured and the idle and the leisured—there is none. You also hear a great deal about the heterodoxy of the American; but if you go to his church—with the exception of the Catholic—you find that he, too, is leaving his heterodoxy to the clergy and the women. A few years ago it was almost impossible to gain entrance to a metropolitan church in the United States, where the preacher happened to be a man of ability or fame. Try it to-day! Though church music has been improved almost to the excellence of oratorios or grand opera, unless it be a festal service like Easter or Christmas, the pews are only sparsely filled. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say this is as true of the country districts as of the city. All through New England are countless country churches that have had to be permanently closed for lack of attendance. But between the churches of the United Kingdom and the United States is a marked difference—it is the air of the preacher. The Englishman is positively sublime in his unconsciousness of the fact that he had lost a grip of his people. The American knows and does not blink the fact and is frantically endeavoring by social service, by popular lectures, by music, by current topics, by vehement eloquence to regain the grip of his people; and it must cut a live manly man to the quick to know that his best efforts on salvation are too often expended on dear old saintly ladies, who could not be damned if they tried.
Now the curious thing about Canada, which I don't attempt in the least to explain, is this: whether the preacher pules, or whines, or moons, or shouts to the rafters, or is gifted with the eloquence to touch "the quick and the dead"; whether the music be a symphony or a dolorous horror of discords; whether there be social service or old-fashioned theology; whether, in fact, the preacher be some raw ignorant stripling from the theological seminary, or a man of divine inspiration and power—whatever is or is not, if the church is a church, from Halifax to Vancouver, you find it full. I have no explanation of this fact. I set it down. Canadians are a vigorously virile people in their church-going. They do it with all their might. I sometimes think that the church does for Canada what music does for continental nations, what dollar-chasing and amusement do for the American nation—opens that great emotional outlet for the play of spiritual powers and idealization, which we must all have if we would rise above the gin-horse haltered to the wheel of toil. "The Happy Warrior" in Watts' picture dreamed of the spirit face above him in his sleep. So may Canada dream in her tireless urgent business of nation-making; and religion may visualize that dream through the church.
Understand—the Canadian is no more religious than the American or the Britisher. He drinks as much whisky as they do light wines and beer. He "cusses" in the same unholy vernacular, only more vigorously. He strikes back as quickly. He hits as hard. He gives his enemy one cheek and then the other, and then both feet and fists; but the Canadian goes to church. One of the most amazing sights of the new frontier cities is to see a church debouching of a Sunday night. The people come out in black floods. In one foreign church in Winnipeg is a membership of four thousand. I think of a little industrial city of Ontario where there is a church—one of three—with a larger membership than any single church in the city of New York.
Canadians not only go to church but they dig down in their pockets for the church. In little frontier cities of the West more is being spent on magnificent temples of worship than has been spent on some European cathedrals. Granted the effects are sometimes garish and squarish and dollar-loud. This is not an age when artisans spend a lifetime carving a single door or a single facade; but when a little place—of say seventeen thousand people—spends one hundred thousand dollars on a church, somebody has laid down the cash; and the Canadian is not a man who spends his cash for no worth. That cash represents something for which he cares almightily in Canadian life. What is it? Frankly I do not know, but I think it is that the church visualizes Canada's ideal in a vision. We love and lose and reach forward to the last. Where? We toil and strive and attain. To what end? Our successes fail, and our failures succeed. Why? And love lights the daily path. But where to? Religion helps to visualize the answers to those questions for Canada.
Another characteristic about religion in Canada, which is very remarkable in an era of decadence in belief, is that the church is a man's job. Unless in some of the little semi-deserted hamlets in the far East, you will find in Canada churches as many men as women. In the West you will find more men than women. The church is not relegated to "the dear sisters." Shoulder to shoulder men and women carry the burden joyfully together, which, perhaps, accounts for the support the church receives from young men. An episode concerning "the dear sisters" will long be remembered of one synod in Montreal. A poor little English curate had come out as a missionary to the Indians of the Northwest. Such misfits are pitiable, as well as laughable. When you consider that in some of these northern parishes a man can reach his different missions only by canoe or dog-train, that the missions are forty miles apart, that the canoe must run rapids and the dog-train dare blizzards—an effeminate type of man is more of a tragedy than a comedy. I think of one mission where the circuit is four hundred miles and the distance to railroad, doctor, post-office, fifty-five miles. This little curate had had a hard time, though his mission was an easy one. When his turn came to report, his face resembled the reflection on an inverted teaspoon. Hardship had taken all the bounce and laugh and joy and rebound out of him. The other frontier missionaries grew restless as he spoke. One magnificent specimen, who had been a gambler in his unregenerate days, began to shuffle uneasily. When the little curate whined about the vices of the Indians, this big frontier missionary pulled off his coat. (He explained to me that it was "a hot night"; besides it "made him mad to hear the poor Indians damned for their vices, when white men, who passed as gentlemen, had more.") Finally, when the little curate appealed to "the dear sisters to raise money to build a fence," the big man could stand it no longer. He ripped his collar loose and sprang to his feet. "Man," he thundered, "pull off your coat and build your own fence and don't trouble the Lord about such trifles. I'm rich on thirty dollars a year. When I need more, I sell a steer. Don't let us bother God-Almighty with such unmanly puling and whining," and much more, he said—which I have told elsewhere—which brought that audience to life with the shocks of a galvanic battery. One of the most successful Indian missionaries in Canada is a full blood Cree. It does not detract from his services in the least that if in the middle of his prayers he hears the wild geese coming in spring, he bangs the Holy Book shut and shouts for the congregation to grab their guns and get a shot.
The virile note in religious life is one of the chief reasons for its support in Canada; and I have been amused to watch English and American friends who have gone to Canada first indifferent to the church-going habit, then touched and finally caught in the current. Does the habit react on public life? Undoubtedly and most strongly! Catholic Quebec and Protestant Ontario for years literally dictated provincial and federal policies; but, with the shift of the balance of power from East to West, that shuffling of Catholic against Protestant and vice versa has ceased in Canadian politics; and those newspapers that gained their support playing on religious prejudice have had to sell and begin with a new sheet. At the same time no policy could be put forward in Canada, no man could stay in public life against the voice of the different churches. If it were not invidious, examples could be given of public men relegated to private life because they violated the principles for which the church stands. The church in Canada is not a dead issue. It is not the city of refuge for the failures and the misfits. It voices the ideals of Canadian men and women busy nation-building. It has been cynically said that the church in England, as far as public men are concerned, lays all its emphasis on the Eighth Commandment, and none at all on the Seventh; and that the church in the United States lays all its emphasis on the Seventh Commandment and none at all on the Eighth. I do not think a politician could be a special acrobat with either of these Commandments and stay in public life in Canada. The clergy would "peel off" those coats and roll up their sleeves and get into the fight. There would be a lot of mud-slinging; but the culprit would go—as not a few have gone in recent years.
IV
Deeply grounded, then, so deeply that the Canadian is unconscious of it, put the belief in the economic principle of vested rights! Still more deeply grounded, put a belief in religious ideals as a working hypothesis! Does any other factor enter deeply in Canadians' every-day living? Yes—next to economic beliefs and religious beliefs, I should put love of outdoor sport as a prime factor in determining Canadian character.
Professional sport has comparatively little place in Canada, though professional baseball has gained a firm foothold in the Northwest, where the American influence is strong, while the International League reaches over the boundary in the East. But it is the amateur who enjoys most favor. If a picked team of bank clerks and office hands and young mechanics in Winnipeg practises up in hockey and comes down from Winnipeg and licks the life out of a team in Montreal or Ottawa, or gets licked, the whole population goes hockey mad. This churchly nation will gamble itself blue in the face with bets and run up gate receipts to send a professional home sick to bed, and I have known of employers forgiving youngsters who bet and lost six months' salary in advance. Montreal will cheer Winnipeg just as wildly when Winnipeg wins in Montreal, as Winnipeg will cheer Montreal when Montreal wins in Winnipeg. It is not the winning. It is the playing of clean good sport that elicits the applause. The same of curling, of football, of cricket, of rowing, of canoeing, of snowshoeing, of yachting, of skeeing, of running. When an Indian won the Marathon, he was lionized almost to his undoing. When hardest frost used to come, I knew a dear old university professor, who would have considered it sin to touch the ace of spades, who used to hie him down to the rink with "bessom" and "stane" and there curl on the ice till his toes almost froze on his feet; and one Episcopal clergyman used to have hard work holding back hot words of youthful habit on the golf links; and his people loved him both because he golfed and because he almost said things, when he golfed. They would rather have a clergyman who golfed and knew "a cuss word" when he saw it, than a saint who couldn't wield a club and might faint at such words as golf elicits.
In one of Canada's best rowing crews, a millionaire merchant was the acting captain of the crew and among his men were a printer, an insurance canvasser, a bank clerk, a clerk in a dry goods store. In one of the most famous hockey teams was a bicycle repairer. Sport in Canada, as in the United States, is the most absolute democracy. I can think of no man in Canada who has attained a permanently good place in social life through catering to women's favor with dandified mannerisms, though not a few have got a leg up to come most terrible croppers; but I do think of many men to whom all doors are permanently open because they are such clean first-rate sportsmen. Until the last ten years of opulent fevered prosperity came to the Dominion, Canada might have been described as a nation of athletes. This does not mean that Canada neglected work for play. It means that she worked so robustly because she had developed strength on the field of play. Three truths are almost axiomatic about nations and sport. It is said that a nation is as it spends its leisure; that nations only win battles as their boys have played in their youth; that man's work is only boy's sport full grown. The religious little catechist may win prizes in the parochial school; but if he doesn't learn to take kicks and give them good and hard, in play, he will not win life's prizes. Fair play, nerve, poise, agility, act that jumps with thought, the robust fronting of life's challenge—these are learned far more on the toboggan slide where you may break your neck, in a snowshoe scamper, than poring over books, or in a parlor. I do not know that Canada has analyzed it out, but she lives it. Young Canada may be bumptious, raw, crude. Time tones these things down; but she is not tired before she has begun the race. She is not nerve-collapsed and peeved and insincere.