Unfortunately creed also became a powerful factor in the political controversies of Upper Canada. By the constitutional act of 1791 large tracts of land were set aside for the support of a "Protestant clergy", and the Church of England successfully claimed for years an exclusive right to these "clergy reserves" on the ground that it was the Protestant church recognised by the state. The clergy of the Church of Scotland in Canada, though very few in number for years, at a later time obtained a share of these grants as a national religious body; but all the dissentient denominations did not participate in the advantages of these reserves. The Methodists claimed in the course of years to be numerically equal to, if not more numerous than, the English Episcopalians, and were deeply irritated at the inferior position they long occupied in the province. So late as 1824 the legislative council, composed of members of the dominant church, rejected a bill allowing Methodist ministers to solemnise marriages, and it was not until 1831 that recognised ministers of all denominations were placed on an equality in this respect. Christian charity was not more a characteristic of those times than political liberality. Methodism was considered by the governing class as a sign of democracy and social inferiority. History repeated itself in Upper Canada. As the Puritans of New England feared the establishment of an Anglican episcopacy, and used it to stimulate a feeling against the parent state during the beginnings of the revolution, so in Upper Canada the dissenting religious bodies made political capital out of the favouritism shown to the Church of England in the distribution of the public lands and public patronage. The Roman Catholics and members of all Protestant sects eventually demanded the secularisation of the reserves for educational or other public purposes, or the application of the funds to the use of all religious creeds. The feeling against that church culminated in 1836, when Sir John Colborne, then lieutenant-governor, established forty-four rectories in accordance with a suggestion made by Lord Goderich some years previously. While the legality of Sir John Colborne's course was undoubted, it was calculated to create much indignant feeling among the dissenting bodies, who saw in the establishment of these rectories an evidence of the intention of the British government to create a state church so far as practicable by law within the province. This act, so impolitic at a critical time of political discussion, was an illustration of the potent influence exercised in the councils of the government by Archdeacon Strachan, who had come into the province from Scotland in 1799 as a schoolmaster. He had been brought up in the tenets of the Presbyterian Church, but some time after his arrival in Canada he became an ordained minister of the Church of England, in which he rose step by step to the episcopacy. He became a member of both the executive