He was also elected syndic of the Bar of Arthabaska, which office he held until his recent appointment as joint prothonotary and Clerk of the Crown for that district. Mr. Hemming has for some years past been an associate member of the Protestant Committee of the Council of Public Instruction for the province of Quebec, where he has been working for some time past to procure the introduction of religious teaching in the Protestant public schools, and has so far succeeded as to have the Bible placed upon the list of authorized text books. In religious matters Mr. Hemming is a member of the Church of England, and has acted for many years past as lay reader whenever his services have been required. And on one occasion in the absence of a clergyman after the church at Drummondville was destroyed by fire, conducted the services for nearly a year, and thereby kept the congregation together. He was churchwarden of St. George’s Church, Drummondville, for eighteen years, and has been elected a delegate to the Diocesan Synod of Quebec and to the Provincial Synod since 1862 without any intermission, and during these 25 years has never failed attending a single session of either of these synods. Mr. Hemming is old-fashioned enough to believe in the Bible, and consequently has no faith in Darwinism, secular education or prohibition. With regard to the latter, he says he cannot bring himself to believe that the Saviour was a criminal when he made and drank wine at the marriage feast, nor when he commanded his disciples to drink wine in his memory at the Lord’s Supper. In politics, he is and has always been a Conservative, and does not believe in the principles of the French or American revolutions, nor in the divine right of the people, and he believes that authority ought to come from above and not from below. Mr. Hemming cannot understand the theory of allowing the fools to elect the wise men, nor why a majority should have the right to utterly crush out the minority, and still less why a small minority that happens to hold the balance of power under our constitution, should have the power of controlling the overwhelming majority of the nation. Neither does he believe in Adam Smith. He has been a protectionist ever since the times of Sir Robert Peel, D’Israeli and Lord George Bentinck, and has never seen any occasion to change his opinion, notwithstanding it was considered rank heresy to say so. After a lifetime he begins to see signs that the British are beginning to discover that our social system is founded on the family, each with its own interest (the nation being merely an extension of that idea), and that until the whole world becomes one family, the theory of free trade which is based on that idea must be inapplicable. It will be seen by the foregoing that Mr. Hemming has led a pretty active life, which may be considered as decidedly professional, having been a sailor, soldier, farmer, lawyer, legislator, judge, doctor (in law) and (lay) parson.