The Anglican Missions are as follows: St. Thomas Mission, held in Delorme schoolroom; St. Cuthbert’s Mission, corner of Beaumont and King Edward Boulevard; St. Hilda’s Mission, Marquette Street; St. Aidan’s Mission, Hamilton Avenue.
PRESBYTERIANS
Presbyterianism, according to the Rev. Dr. Robert Campbell, in his history of St. Gabriel’s Street Church, started in Montreal in a room in St. Lawrence Suburbs on March 12, 1786, when the meeting for the organization of the first Presbyterian congregation took place. Most of those present were Scotch soldiers of the old Seventy-Eighth, or Fraser Highlanders, who had fought the campaign leading to the conquest of Canada at the capitulation of Montreal in 1760. After the peace of 1763 a large proportion of the Highlanders elected to stay in the country, many settling round Montreal and its district. When the North West Company was organized these men were of the same metal as that adventurous Gaelic band, and of the men now gathered, some “as youths had been actually engaged in the fight at Culloden in 1745, while several were the children or the descendants of those brave men who had stood on the side of ‘Prince Charlie’ on that fated field.” The organizer was the Rev. John Bethune, an ex-chaplain of the Eighty-Fourth Regiment who, however, left Montreal in 1787. His son, the Rev. John Bethune, an Anglican, became afterwards famous as the first principal of McGill University, from 1835 to 1852.
From May, 1787, till 1790 there exists no records of services held according to Presbyterian forms. They seem as said to have followed those of the “Rector of the Parish of Montreal and Chaplain of the Garrison,” the Rev. David Chatbrand De Lisle, a Swiss who spoke English indifferently. The first regular Presbyterian minister was the Rev. John Young, from Schenectady, who was a stormy petrel, but he did good work for eleven years at Montreal. It was he who organized the erection of St. Gabriel’s Street Church, the first regular Protestant Church in Old Canada, prior to 1867, for that chapel erected at Berthier six years earlier by James Cuthbert, seigneur of Berthier, a Scotch Presbyterian, is claimed to have been only in the nature of a private domestic chapel attached to his seigneurial manor. In the interval between 1786 and 1792, occasional services were held in the government property known as the old Jesuit Church, which was also being shared by the Anglicans prior to the erection of the first Christ Church.
The land was bought on St. Gabriel Street on April 2, 1792. Until the church was built the Récollet Fathers allowed the use of their church to the “Society of Presbyterians,” also for occasional services. The fathers refused any remuneration, but were induced to accept a present of two hogsheads of Spanish wine, containing sixty-odd gallons, each, and a box of candles, amounting in all to £14-2-4. The “Scotch Church,” “the Protestant Presbyterian Church” or “the Presbyterian Church of Montreal,” as it was variously called at the time, was built in 1792, Messrs. Telfer and McIntosh executing the mason work and Mr. Joseph Perrault the carpentry work.
The Rev. Mr. Young’s committee were elected on May 8, 1791, to arrange the “temporals” of the congregation, and were mostly good Scotch traders, viz.: Messrs. Richard Dobie, Alex. Henry, Adam Scott, William Stewart, Alex. Fisher, John Lilly, William Hunter, Duncan Fisher, William England, Alex. Hannah, Peter McFarlane, George Kay, John Robb, Thomas Baker, John Empey, John Russell. Of these nine were to be sufficient to form a quorum.
The list of subscribers to the church building fund reveals the names of most of the principal merchants at this time, as well as those of the “Gentlemen of the North West,” so that St. Gabriel’s was a weighty congregation. But although Protestants, the worshippers were not all Scotch or Presbyterians. Doctor Campbell points out John Gregory, Joseph Frobisher, Benaiah Gibb, Thomas Baker, John Molson, James Woolrich, J.A. Gray, Thomas Busby, R. Brooks and John Gray, as Englishmen; Sir John Johnson, Andrew Todd, Thomas Sullivan, Isaac Todd and John Neagles, Irishmen; John J. Deihl and Andrew Winclefoss, Germans; J.H. Germain and François Deslard, Frenchmen; Hannah Empey and Peter Pangman, New England Loyalists, the others being Scots either by birth or descent, some Highlanders, others Lowlanders.
A portion separated from the Mother Church and formed a congregation for themselves on St. Peter Street in 1804, building a church in 1807 opposite to St. Sacrament Street. This was continued by St. Andrew’s (Beaver Hall Hill) Church, opened in 1851. It was then thought to be a long way from the city. It was burnt down in 1869, but was shortly afterwards restored to the original plan.
The next off-shoot from St. Gabriel’s was the predecessor of the present church of St. Paul, erected in 1834 in St. Helen Street, at the corner of Récollet Street, which in 1867 was sold and taken down, and a new church built on the corner of Dorchester Street and St. Geneviève Street. During the interval the congregation worshipped in the Belmont Street Normal School below.
The above scissions had been merely local and physical. But the greatest crisis in the history of the old church of St. Gabriel was caused by the great constitutional Free Church controversy, being agitatedly carried on in the parent church of Scotland and necessarily duplicated in the loyal colonial presbytery of Montreal. So that from 1830 bitter and personal rancours cleft the community.