Hitherto religion has been viewed in its social and spiritual aspects. But Canadian history has, with perhaps over-emphasis, selected one great controversy as the central point in the religious life of the province. It is not my intention to enter here into the wearisome details of the Clergy Reserve question. But the fight over the establishment principle forms an essential factor in the social and political life of Canada between 1839 and 1854, the year in which it was finally settled. It is first necessary to discriminate between what may be called casual and incidental support to churches in Canada, and the main Clergy Reserve {48} fund. When Dr. Black challenged, in the interests of Presbyterianism, certain monies paid to Anglican churches in Upper and Lower Canada, he was able to point to direct assistance given by the Imperial Parliament to the Anglican Church in Canada. He was told in answer that these grants were temporarily made to individuals with whose lives they terminated, and that a pledge had been given in 1832 that Britain should be relieved of such expenses.[50] In a similar fashion, when the district of Perth, in Upper Canada, was settled by discharged soldiers and emigrants from Scotland, "Government offered assistance for the support of a minister, _without respect to religious denomination_," and, as a matter of fact, the community thus assisted to a clergyman, received, not a minister of the Church of Scotland, but one ordained by the Secession Church in Scotland--a curious but laudable example of laxity on the part of government.[51] The root and ground of offending lay in the thirty-sixth and following clauses of the Constitutional Act of 1791, which proposed to support {49} and maintain a Protestant clergy in the provinces by grants of land, equal in value to the seventh part of lands granted for other purposes. On the face of it, and interpreted by the clauses which follow, the Act seems to bear out the Anglican contention that the English Church establishment received an extension to Canada through the Act, and that no other church was expected to receive a share. It is true that the legal decision of 1819, and the views of colonial secretaries like Glenelg, admitted at least the Scottish Church to a portion of the benefits. But for the purposes of the situation in 1839, it is merely necessary to say that a British parliament in 1791, ignorant of actual colonial conditions, and more especially of the curious ecclesiastical developments with which the American colonies had modified the British system before 1776, and probably forgetful of the claims of the Church of Scotland to parliamentary recognition, had given Canada the beginnings of an Anglican Church establishment; and that the Anglicans in Canada, and more especially those led by Dr. John Strachan, had more than fulfilled the sectarian and monopolist intentions of the legislators.