3. The conduct of the Imperial and Canadian Governments towards the Church of England.
4. The effect of the union of the two Canadas on the proceedings and votes of the Legislative Assembly in regard to the Church of England.
5. Public grants to the Church of Rome, and the endowment of that Church in Lower Canada.
6. The Toronto University and Public Schools.
I am to notice in the first place the statements of the Lord Bishop respecting the circumstances and objects of the Clergy Land Reservation. He speaks of it as having been suggested by the circumstances of the American revolution, and as having been intended as the special reward of those who adhered to the Crown of England during that seven years' contest.
The Bishop says:—
At the close of the war, in 1783, which gave independence to the United States, till then colonies of the British Crown, great numbers of the inhabitants, anxious to preserve their allegiance, and, in as far as they were able, the unity of the empire, sought refuge in the western part of Canada, beyond the settlements made before the conquest under the King of France. These loyalists, who had for seven years perilled their lives and fortunes in defence of the throne, the law, and the religion of England, had irresistible claims when driven from their homes into a strange land (yet a vast forest), to the immediate protection of government, and to enjoy the same benefits which they had abandoned from their laudable attachment to the parent State.
The Bishop subsequently states [See Chapter xxviii., page 219] that the object of the Constitutional Act of 1791 was
More especially to confer upon the loyalists such a constitution as should be as near a transcript as practicable of that of England, that they might have no reason to regret, in as far as religion, law, and liberty were concerned, the great sacrifices which they had made.
Allusions of this kind pervade a considerable part of the Bishop's letter, and furnish the first example, within my knowledge, of any writer attempting to invest the dispute between the American colonies and the mother country with a religious character; when every person the least acquainted with the history of those colonies, and of that contest, knows that the question of religion was never alluded to on the part of the colonists—that General Washington and other principal leaders in the revolution were professed Episcopalians—that the Church of England did not exist as an established church in any of those colonies, unless adopted as such by the local legislature, as in the case of Virginia—and that in the northern and eastern parts of those colonies, whence the first emigration to Upper Canada took place after the peace of 1783, the Church of England never did exist as an established church. Therefore, for the "religion of England" in that sense, those "loyalists" never could have "perilled their lives and fortunes;" nor could they have been influenced by any predilections for an establishment which they had never seen. The Bishop says truly that: