About the same time, Messrs. Henry and William Rowsell, well-known booksellers, undertook the printing of the Church newspaper, which was transferred from Cobourg to Toronto, under the editorship of Mr. John Kent,—a giant in his way—and subsequently of the Rev. A. N. Bethune, since, and until lately, Bishop of Toronto.
Being intimate friends of my own, they offered me the charge of their printing office, with the position of a partner, which I accepted; and made over my interest in the Herald to Mr. Barber.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE CLERGY RESERVES.
I have lately astonished some of my friends with the information, that William Lyon Mackenzie was originally an advocate of the Clergy Reserves—that is, of state endowment for religious purposes—a fact which makes his fatal plunge into treason the more to be regretted by all who coincide with him on the religious question.
In Lindsey's "Memoirs" we read (vol. 1, p. 46):
"A Calvinist in religion, proclaiming his belief in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and a Liberal in politics, yet was Mr. Mackenzie, at that time, no advocate of the voluntary principle. On the contrary, he lauded the British Government for making a landed endowment for the Protestant clergy in the Provinces, and was shocked at the report that, in 1812, voluntaryism had robbed three millions of people of all means of religious ordinances. 'In no part of the constitution of the Canadas,' he said, 'is the wisdom of the British Legislature more apparent than in its setting apart a portion of the country, while yet it remained a wilderness, for the support of religion.'
. . . "Mr. Mackenzie compared the setting apart of one-seventh of the public lands for religious purposes to a like dedication in the time of the [early] Christians. But he objected that the revenues were monopolized by one church, to which only a fraction of the population belonged. The envy of the non-recipient denominations made the favoured Church of England unpopular.
. . . "Where the majority of the present generation of Canadians will differ from him, is that on the Clergy Reserves question, he did not hold the voluntary view. At that time, he would have denounced secularization as a monstrous piece of sacrilege."[15]
How much to be regretted is it, that instead of splitting up the Clergy Reserves into fragments, the friends of religious education had not joined their forces for the purpose of endowing all Christian denominations with the like means of usefulness. We are now extending across the entire continent what I cannot help regarding as the anti-Christian practice of non-religious popular education. We are, I believe, but smoothing the road to crime in the majority of cases. Cannot something be done now, while yet the lands of the vast North-West are at our disposal? Will no courageous legislator raise his voice to advocate the dedication of a few hundred thousand acres to unselfish purposes? Have we wiled away the Indian prairies from their aboriginal owners, to make them little better than a race-course for speculating gamblers?