The members of the Family Compact, with very few exceptions, were members of the Church of England, which, owing to the before-mentioned provisions in the Constitutional Act, they regarded as the State Church of Upper Canada, established by law, and entitled to the special veneration of the inhabitants. They accounted all persons as members of the Church of England who were not actual members of some other religious body, and in enumerating the people for statistical purposes they sometimes even went so far as to include the infant children of Dissenters as Episcopalians. They sought to defend the alleged establishment of a State Church in Canada by arguments which it is astonishing to think that men of education and intelligence should ever have stooped to employ. "There should be in every Christian country an established religion," said Dr. Strachan, in his evidence before the Select Committee on Grievances, in 1835, "otherwise it is not a Christian but an infidel country."[49] According to their theory, one of the principal ends of the Government of Upper Canada was the propagation of religious truth as set forth in the doctrines of the Church of England. True, the arguments on the subject were not so well understood then as now. Mr. Gladstone's little volume on "The State in its Relations with the Church," and Macaulay's answer thereto in the _Edinburgh Review_, had not then been published. But some of the most conclusive arguments adduced by Macaulay were as old as the world itself; and even Mr. Gladstone, in all his youthful exuberance, did not venture to take so preposterous a stand as was assumed by the upholders of a State Church in this Province. Their bigotry and intolerance were utterly out of keeping with the times in which they lived, and were better suited to the days of Archbishop Laud or Sir Robert Filmer. Of that heaven-born charity which suffereth long, and is kind; which vaunteth not itself, and is not puffed up; which seeketh not her own, and is not easily provoked; which thinketh no evil; which rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; which beareth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things--of the spirit which impels to such a state of mind as this, we find few traces in the lives and writings of the upholders of State-Churchism in Upper Canada in those days. We find, on the contrary, much unkindness, much vaunting of themselves, much selfish conceit, much seeking, not only of their own, but of that which of right belonged to their neighbours. The champions of ecclesiastical monopoly were easily provoked to anger, and to thinking and speaking all manner of evil of those who differed from them as to the distribution of the Clergy Reserves. Roman Catholicism they contemplated with a certain amount of toleration, as the Roman Catholic hierarchy yielded the Government an unwavering support in return for the freedom and privileges which they enjoyed. But their toleration was not